Timmy on Taxes

Ready. Aim…

A big whoop engendered yesterday by the Growth and Justice gang’s ad in the Strib yesterday indicating the willingness of 200 upper income Minnesotans to pay more tax to fund education, transportation and health care got the expected response from Tim “I answer only to David Strom” Pawlenty: “If those people want to send their checks to the state, I’ll pose with them for a photo.”

I can’t figure why I’d want a picture of me with Pawlenty, other than for target practice. (I once used a picture of the actress Lily Taylor that I picked up at a Walker screening for a target at the range, so why not? It’s just paper.)

I should disclose that I was one of the signers of the ad, although I’ve long since stopped being a higher income Minnesotan. I did it not because I want my taxes raised, but because, since taxes have been lowered here, things have begun to go to hell. We need only look at the idiotic attempt to get contractors to bid on the remake of the Crosstown Highway-35W interchange–and finance it themselves–to see where Pawlenty’s tax cuts have left us.

If you want further evidence, you could of course look at property tax increases of 10-12 percent per year in Minneapolis–a regressive tax if there ever was one–that comes about as a feeble attempt to make up for the state aid the city used to get.

Since we got Timmy Taxcut, we’ve got fewer police, (and surprise! more crime.) We’ve got Minneapolis libraries that are only open 3 days per week, and we’ve got a transportation system that is costing us millions in lost productivity and fuel waste. But at least we can take the time we’re sitting dead on the freeways to count our tax savings.

If everyone on that list of people who signed that ad would do as Timmy says and send in their check, the math tells us that would amount to $1.2 million. (200 earners of $300,000 each sending in 2 percent.) Indeed that entire amount is about 12 percent of what Minneapolis needs just to restore library service to what it was before the state cut off the funds.

Of course, I’m willing to bet that group puts its money where its mouth is in other ways. I’m fairly familiar with the Minneapolis Library’s situation and there are a lot of those names on the big donor wall in the new library–among and right along side of the taxpayers of Minneapolis who voted to raise their own taxes to build the thing.

My next contribution, though, is going to be to whoever can beat Pawlenty in November. We need a leader here, and he just doesn’t have anything deeper than the sound bite mentality of his childish response.