Tweet
Minnesota brought an end to their government shutdown yesterday. On the surface, the talk is that Gov. Mark Dayton gave up on a balanced solution to the budget gap there, by abandoning higher taxes. However, as noted by Phoenix Woman, the intricacies of the budget deal show that Dayton did get something for his trouble:
In a way, each had lost a political friend: Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton gave up his long-held demand that the richest Minnesotans pay higher taxes; Republican House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch gave up their party’s strongly held stance of keeping state spending to no more than $34 billion in the next two years.
But in giving up what they fought for all year, they reached a framework of a budget deal that could end a shutdown entering its 15th day today.
It appears that the new cuts are actually fund shifts, moving the problem into the future. In addition, Republicans give up all of their policy riders and government stays larger than they requested. A 15% cut to the state workforce will disappear. And there’s some stimulus involved in the form of a $500 million road bond (which is a very large stimulus for a state of that size).
Maybe there are better solutions out there. But in exchange for giving up on taxing 7,700 millionaires in Minnesota a little extra, Dayton got some things. That’s known as a compromise, and Dayton is in a materially worse position than at the federal level, with both chambers of the legislature governed by Republicans. What’s more, it’s a two-year budget plan, the last one Dayton will have to negotiate with this particular legislature. AND, because it was a deal with Republicans in the legislature, Democrats won’t be voting for it, putting the entire burden on the opposition.
But James Hohmann wants to read this as a Republican vanquish, and apply it to the debt limit debate.
There are national implications from the deal: if congressional Republicans draw the lesson from this imbroglio that the president might buckle on the debt ceiling debate if they stand as firm as the Minnesota GOP did for the last two weeks, the likelihood of default increases.
That doesn’t really get this right. Republicans have the burden of voting for the proposal, which could get them in big trouble with their base. Spending increases from their desired number and a stimulus package is included. They lose every social policy. The moral here is that both sides gave up something and politically Republicans have to vote for it and defend it. That’s not the lesson House Republicans really want to learn.
3 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
It’s about the beer, of course. Actually, the government shutdown showed a level of irresponsibility that occasioned real harm on many fronts, and may provide the spur it will take to get voters out to end this disarray – hopefully by throwing out those who promised jobs and gave an end of workers’ rights instead.
it really is about the beer. One day with that threatened and the goops came tumbling down.
social security prolly works the same magic, but beer is most reliable.
It’s not about the beer — not unless you like Miller and Coors, which I don’t. (Minnesota has plenty of good local beers, like Surly.)
The Republicans currently controlling both Houses of the Minnesota state legislature campaigned on jobs, cutting the deficit, and cutting “wasteful” spending, with various social issues in the mix. They then spent the entire session pushing garbage like stem-cell bans and anti-union legislation.
Dayton gave them a Hobson’s Choice between protecting everything they claimed to stand for — balanced budgets, smaller government, and a smorgasbord of conservative gimmes — and protecting the rich from having to pay a cent more in taxes.
They chose to junk everything else to protect the rich.
Hell, they even agreed to a $500 million bonding bill to be used as stimulus money! Scaling upward from Minnesota to the nation as a whole, can you imagine Boehner and McConnell agreeing to, say, $300 billion worth of additional stimulus right now? (And unlike Obama, Dayton has to deal with not one, but two, legislative houses under GOP control.)
I suspect that the key here, as always, is that Dayton didn’t pre-compromise from the start. He started with demanding a tax increase on the top 2% of income dealers, and was roundly mocked by the local media for making an impossible demand. But he stuck to it as long as he could, scaling it back to cover just those who make $1 million or more a year. Finally, he dropped that demand on the condition that the GOP dump everything on which they’d campaigned, including opposition to “expanding” government (which is of course what the bonding bill is about — it’s a jobs program) — and they acquiesced.