Columnist: The courage to do what needs to be done?
02/12/2007
By Lori Sturdevant,
Star Tribune
Published: February 11, 2007
At 85 members strong (out of a possible 134), the new Minnesota House DFL majority is big. It remains to be seen whether it's brave.
"Fiscal prudence" (read no tax increase) has been the new majority's official watchword, so far. But plenty of nudges in a bolder direction have been coming at them in the three weeks since Gov. Tim Pawlenty released his skinny "no-new-taxes" budget proposal for 2008-09.
Hearken to the words of University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks last Tuesday. He was back in the classroom (that would be Room 5, State Office Building), doing a little teaching about the improbability of building a first-rate research university on third-rate state support.
State Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, asked a good question. If the university needs more than the Republican governor proposes to allocate, "Where would you like us to get the money?"
Bruininks cleared his throat, carefully allowed that he was about to venture his own opinion rather than an officially sanctioned view, and said: "If it means, long term, that we have to put more and more of the cost of higher education on the backs of students, if it means long term that we've got to experience this kind of [financial] roller-coaster ride we've had for the past four years, you can raise my taxes."
It had to be apparent to every member of the House higher education finance panel that standing pat on taxes will result in the very ills Bruininks described. The status quo also means precious little or no relief from today's large K-12 class sizes, teachers' salaries that stay below average, unsafe and congested highways, inadequate preschool preparation, and property taxes that go up and up while police, fire and library services go down.
The recession is long past. Perpetually pinched public services appears to be this state's new norm. Minnesota's "high-tax/high-services" formula for success in the 20th century gave way with the tax cuts of 1999-2001 to a "middling-tax/modest-services" recipe for mediocrity.
Education Minnnesota, the politically potent, DFL-allied teachers' union, was among those trying to make that point last week. It brought to the Capitol a consulting economist with an impressive pedigree, Richard Sims, to present research findings he has already shared with 30 other states in the last two years. Among them:
• States with the most robust economic growth also take a bigger tax bite, on average, than do slow-growth states.
• Increases in education spending produce greater economic gain for a state than would a comparable reduction in corporate income taxes (this based on an Oregon study).
• Relatively high business taxes, "as long as they are not outlandishly out of line with other states," tend not to be harmful to economic growth.
"It's not that high state taxes are good for growth," Sims said. "It's that the relatively high level of services that are associated with relatively high taxes seems to attract growth, rather than repel it." Among the services state governments provide, the top three in importance for economic growth are "education, education, education," he added.
How receptive to pro-tax arguments are DFL House members -- many of them nervous freshmen, some of them representing historically Republican districts? That won't be clear until sometime after April Fools' Day.
What is clear, though, is that the jittery ones are looking for political arguments as well as scholarly ones, to buttress the case for sending a bill that increases taxes to a governor who's almost sure to veto it. I heard a few of those, too, last week:
• 2008 isn't looking now like it will be a perilous year for Democrats, nationwide.
• The DFL Senate majority voted for hefty tax increases several times from 2003 through 2006 -- and gained seats in the last election.
• DFLers are going to be accused of being "tax-and-spend liberals" no matter how they govern. That's been the GOP campaign mantra for 50 years. Why not be able to counter the charge by pointing to the good that some visible new spending will do for the state?
Given who sits in the governor's office, if DFLers pass a budget that contains a tax increase, they'll likely wind up pointing to the good they would have done, but for a veto they couldn't override. That might not be bad politics, either.