Welcome Britt Robson to PIM

We welcome Britt Robson as an occasional contributor to PIM.Britt has written for City Pages and MinnPost.

The title of Britt’s first post, "The state’s budget crisis:A decade of cooking the books," provides ample notice that Britt’s politics are different than mine — and that’s the point.

I’ll have lots more to say about the budget in the coming days and months.

A quick placeholder for now:

I disagree with some of
Britt’s budget premises, not the least of which are the budgets GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty has
crafted in the past.These were
compromises with a DFL-controlled legislature.For example, DFLers found it much easier to raid the Rainy Day fund than
make cuts in key programs with key DFL constituencies like education. And, am I
the only one who’s tired of hearing from former finance commissioners on what’s
wrong with the Pawlenty Administration?!
These guys never governed in an era of historic budget deficits. Nevertheless, Britt does a masterful job of
laying out the case against the Pawlenty approach.I’ll look forward to Pawlenty’s detractors
providing specifics on what they would do to solve the budget deficit.

Because — as the Governor noted a short while ago on MPR, we are in the midst of "historic, dramatic, quantum change in government," both here and across the country.

Previous Minnesota gubernatorial administrations didn’t face the largest budget deficit in state history, let alone during the worst economic climate since the 1930s.

One Response to “Welcome Britt Robson to PIM”

1. Anonymous Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 10:04 am

   Yeah, this is a historic crises, one that was created by Magic Plan (cut taxes and wait for the magic to happen) Republican economics! The circular reasoning here is breathtaking. The Republican strategy has been to cut revenue, create deficits, and then use those deficits to demand cuts in government services, all in the name of “small government” ideology. Not only was this was an unprecedented assault on the most vulnerable people of MN (who’s services were cut while our tax allergic governor and legislators found a way to raise taxes for a new stadium) it was Enron accounting that has now generated a devastating budget crises. Now they point to the crises and yet again want to use it as an excuse to further dismantle government services. The reason former finance commissioners never governed during “historic budget deficits” is because they didn’t create a historic budget crises in the first place. Unlike our governor and his Republican allies, they relied on arithmetic rather than faith in magic when it came to fiscal policy, and unlike our governor and his allies, they assumed their mission was to run the government rather than dismantle it.