![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatcrazycajunIf by any chance your holiday weekend vacation plans include a trip to or through the great midwestern state of Minnesota, you might want to revise your itinerary...at least, if you were hoping to use any state-run rest stops, state parks, museums, zoos or other facilities. As a result of the intransigence of the Republican leaders of the Gopher State's legislature, all of these will be closed...possibly for weeks. CNN tells you why here...or you can settle for the Readers' Digest version here below:
Like most states and the federal government as well, Minnesota faces a humongous deficit in its state budget due to the economic downturn; about five billion dollars, give or take. And like most of those other governments, it also faced a deadline (in this case, midnight on the last day of the fiscal year, which was this past Friday) to pass a balanced budget for 2012. And as with John Boner and company up in Washington, the state's GOP solons are digging in their heels and pulling a Newt Gingrich, letting the state run out of money to run even essential facilities and services rather than admit that revenue increases—or as they prefer to call them, tax hikes—will have to be part of the solution along with reductions in spending and elimination of waste and fraud.
The GOP leaders in St. Paul accuse their Democrat governor, Mark Dayton (successor to current presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty) of being the one at fault for the shutdown, saying they laid a passed budget on his desk in time for him to sign it and beat the deadline. Dayton's response was that any budget containing only spending cuts and no new revenue was nothing but a political publicity stunt. And so it was that as many people headed out of town for the Independence Day weekend, thousands of state employees were told to stay home until further notice. This augurs exceedingly ill for the as yet equally futile effort by Congressional Dems and President Barack Obama to get Boehner and his cronies to allow some revenue-enhancing measures and finalize a fiscal 2012 budget. This would be before the major agencies carry out their threats to downgrade Uncle Sam's heretofore sterling AAA credit rating, for the first time in the history whose beginning we celebrate this weekend...and default on the government's even more massive debts is triggered.
Their own most sainted icon, the late former President Ronald Reagan, gives the lie to the GOP's dogged insistence that raising taxes kills jobs, as he and his fellow right-wingers then running Congress raised taxes more than once in his eight years in office without the massive unemployment we're seeing now. So Your Humble Correspondent is of the opinion that someone ought to go up to St. Paul and slap some sense into the idiots running the Lege...and then do likewise for the ones in D.C.—or else Minnesotans could start suffering immediately what the rest of us will likely endure when August 2nd arrives. And he can't wait to hear what one of our most famous Minnesotans, public radio's Garrison Keillor, has to say about it all...
Like most states and the federal government as well, Minnesota faces a humongous deficit in its state budget due to the economic downturn; about five billion dollars, give or take. And like most of those other governments, it also faced a deadline (in this case, midnight on the last day of the fiscal year, which was this past Friday) to pass a balanced budget for 2012. And as with John Boner and company up in Washington, the state's GOP solons are digging in their heels and pulling a Newt Gingrich, letting the state run out of money to run even essential facilities and services rather than admit that revenue increases—or as they prefer to call them, tax hikes—will have to be part of the solution along with reductions in spending and elimination of waste and fraud.
The GOP leaders in St. Paul accuse their Democrat governor, Mark Dayton (successor to current presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty) of being the one at fault for the shutdown, saying they laid a passed budget on his desk in time for him to sign it and beat the deadline. Dayton's response was that any budget containing only spending cuts and no new revenue was nothing but a political publicity stunt. And so it was that as many people headed out of town for the Independence Day weekend, thousands of state employees were told to stay home until further notice. This augurs exceedingly ill for the as yet equally futile effort by Congressional Dems and President Barack Obama to get Boehner and his cronies to allow some revenue-enhancing measures and finalize a fiscal 2012 budget. This would be before the major agencies carry out their threats to downgrade Uncle Sam's heretofore sterling AAA credit rating, for the first time in the history whose beginning we celebrate this weekend...and default on the government's even more massive debts is triggered.
Their own most sainted icon, the late former President Ronald Reagan, gives the lie to the GOP's dogged insistence that raising taxes kills jobs, as he and his fellow right-wingers then running Congress raised taxes more than once in his eight years in office without the massive unemployment we're seeing now. So Your Humble Correspondent is of the opinion that someone ought to go up to St. Paul and slap some sense into the idiots running the Lege...and then do likewise for the ones in D.C.—or else Minnesotans could start suffering immediately what the rest of us will likely endure when August 2nd arrives. And he can't wait to hear what one of our most famous Minnesotans, public radio's Garrison Keillor, has to say about it all...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-07-03 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-03 07:24 pm (UTC)It's possible that watching the actual results of FAIL in Minnesota (as opposed to sitting in their right wing fishbowls discussing how this will really shatter the delusion that the public even needs a government in the first place, and we'll have free marketopia instead and jobs will appear because the peasants will now be motivated to get off their fat asses and find work) will convince the Republicans that they're doing the wrong thing. Pigs might fly.