Governor Pawlenty wants your ideas about how to cut state spending.
No, really, he does. He's asked legislators to forward their ideas for general fund spending cuts, just in case any new ideas occur to them after working on the budget for the past four months. And he's even set up a special email address for you: budgetideas@state.mn.us.
Maybe the governor sees this empty PR gesture as conciliatory. But judging from the suggestions made by the public so far, I doubt he'll get anything new beyond what he already has — and certainly nothing that will change his basic course of cutting expenditures that benefit the poorest and least politically powerful Minnesotans.
Early this year, the Minnesota Senate created a web site dedicated to discussion of the budget. The section on the HHS budget alone received 140 comments, with the first comment out of the box:
[Reagan-era imagery of welfare queens living high on the hog was also popular with pig farmer and GOP Rep. Rod Hamilton, who remarked in the closing days of the session how people on welfare drive nicer cars than most of the rest of us do.]
In February, a coalition of conservative organizations introduced their budget solutions site. It seems to have received only four comments before they were closed out of embarrassment. Minnesota Public Radio created a Budget Shortfall Idea Generator that attracted about 100 comments.
The Star Tribune announced a Streamlining Minnesota series that proposed "new ideas for the public sector." It ran out of steam after only three more op-eds in two weeks, and the promised section for reader comments devoted to the series is indistinguishable from the regular opinion exchange section.
And, of course, DFL legislators conducted budget-focused listening sessions throughout the state.
Through all this, progressives were wasting our time talking about "needs" and "quality of life" and "human suffering" and "fairness." And forget major structural reforms.
It's all about cuts, stupid.
We have a governor, an extremely skilled politician, who appears to be looking through Laffer-colored glasses at a run for the presidency. And people's fears about the economy are enabling his boldness.
His approach is as simple as his message. In times of economic uncertainty, people don't know the right course, so they follow the guy who most looks like he knows what he's doing. To a large extent, that's the Obama formula once you extract the hope stuff.
Gov. Pawlenty knows what he's doing politically. If he doesn't plan to be around to clean up his own mess, it matters to him a bit less whether he knows what he's doing economically. Any negative results will be manifest as a continued decline, not a fall off the cliff, so they might not hurt him while he's still in office here.
He wants your ideas for cover, not because he can't decide where to cut. I can hear the speech now:
"Ralph, a farmer in New Harmony, suggested I should cut welfare by $300 million. Well, actually Minnesota's public assistance spending is only 1.4% of the state's budget; the national average for all states 1.8%. So I figured he meant cut publicly funded health insurance — and sure enough, I was able to find $381 million to cut. Thanks, Ralph!
"Eloise, who owns a small business in Blackduck and has a son in Iraq, said 'why are we taxpayers paying all this local government aid to places we don't even visit?' And she's right. So I'm cutting Blackduck's LGA by — oh, let's say somewhere between 20 and 40 grand. And I see Minneapolis can spare another $35 million.
"And Bob Smith of Circle Pines said: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut...."
