http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1259/article12863.aspIn some ways the checkered two-year reign of Tim Pawlenty has looked less like an exercise in governance than a deliberate and increasingly harrowing game of chicken. Since famously signing on to the Taxpayers League of Minnesota's "no new taxes" pledge during his 2002 gubernatorial run--a classic instance of a politician being led in shackles to exactly the spot where he meant to stand all along--Pawlenty has remained steadfast in his commitment to austerity now and forever. His first budget cycle, in 2003, found the state facing a $4.2 billion hole in its finances that Pawlenty himself, as a tax-hawking member of the state legislature, had been instrumental in creating.
Pawlenty balanced that first biennial budget with a flurry of fiscal derring-do that left many legislators and onlookers alike to sort out later what had actually happened:
* $2 billion in cuts to state services
* more than a $1 billion taking of onetime monies, most of it from the tobacco settlement fund
* the imposition of approximately $400 million in additional user fees
* the shifting of more than $150 million worth of obligations onto local property taxpayers
* and the juggling of hundreds of millions more dollars through various accounting shifts and delayed payment arrangements.
Less than three weeks after the passage of this budget, Moody's Investors Service--"the most thorough of the bond houses, and the one we always paid the most attention to," says former Republican Governor Arne Carlson--downgraded Minnesota's bond rating from AAA to AA1. Sigh... the article only gets worse. Especially when the idiot public can't figure it out that a government fee increase is tantamount to a TAX INCREASE.
TnT there is the hypocritest hypocrite of them all. x(
It's a big article, but here's one more tidbit:
Pawlenty's approach to health care bears his usual trademarks--a preponderance of fees and a desire to shift costs onto other units of government. Even low-income citizens face new or increased payments for eyeglasses, dental care, and prescription drugs, and working poor families face increased insurance premiums that jeopardize their ability to stay on the insurance plan. Thousands of "noncitizens" and single adults have already been bumped off the insurance rolls, shifting the cost of their care to locally supported hospitals and community clinics. But Pawlenty's fiscal approach demands the ongoing diversion of tax dollars ostensibly dedicated to assisting poor, sick people to prop up the state's general fund.