“She seems nice” part 2
As I said in the first She seems nice, the Republican Pat-Nixon-cloth-coat suburban mom and fourth-term Minnesota House member from Maple Grove, Kristen Robbins, is running for governor. I observed that Rep. Robbins was an author of H.R. 13, a bill to eliminate the duty to retreat as element of a claim of self defense against a charge of causing bodily hard to another.
I have also observed that every place the duty to retreat was eliminated in favor of what many (including me) call “shoot first,” that a material uptick in gun violence ensues. But this is hardly the only odious policy position that Kristen Robbins has.
Kristen Robbins was not only the chief author, but the only author of H.F. 2970, a bill to eliminate accounting for inflation on the expenditure side in forecasts of the Minnesota state budget. I mean, crikey, not even Wally Hudson signed on to this clunker. Thankfully, it died in committee without a hearing. Here’s the first section of the bill:
Forecast parameters. The forecast must assume the continuation of current laws and reasonable estimates of projected growth in the national and state economies and affected populations. Revenue must be estimated for all sources provided for in current law. Expenditures must be estimated for all obligations imposed by law and those projected to occur as a result of inflation and variables outside the control of the legislature. Expenditure estimates must not include an allowance for inflation.
The underlined sentence is the added language.
It was only after twenty year of ignoring inflation on the expenditure side of forecasts that the Legislature’s DFL trifecta put consideration of it back in 2023. We were the only state, I think, that did it this way.
Robbins is the co-vice chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. She is supposed to be one of the responsible ones.
In order to understand why this is such a monumentally stupid idea, we have to go back to the heady days of the Ventura administration, at the end of an era when Francis Fukuyama’s book claiming that history was over and that the United States had won still had some currency; Chris Ferrell proclaimed that we had repealed the business cycle, and Minnesota had enjoyed a string of budget surpluses.
The surpluses were variously spent (which Republicans hated especially), put into a rainy day fund, and rebated to taxpayers. Gov. Ventura and enough members of the lege thought that the good times would last forever, and income taxes were permanently reduced.
Naturally, the worm turned almost immediately. The business cycle had not been repealed after all!
The 2002 session of the legislature, Governor Jesse’s last, was devoted to cutting programs; virtually all discretionary spending got the axe. Because they wanted to cover their tracks, I suppose, the lege erased consideration of inflation from the expenditure side of forecasts — just as Robbins wants to do now — to minimize the size of the deficits in spending.
Governor Gutshot — Tim Pawlenty — was elected governor in the fall of 2002, so he had a big hand in budgeting starting in the 2003-4 biennium. Policy wonks in Minnesota call this the beginning of the Lost Decade. Ignoring inflation helped him gloss over the dwindling funding for things like education. It began a trend in real dollars that has lasted for more than twenty years.
From the St. Paul Teachers Union, based on Dept. Education data
Imagine putting Pollyanna Robbins behind the governor’s desk. No thank you.
But this is hardly all of it. Stay tuned.
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