What kind of state do you want?

With Governor Pawlenty's pronouncements on the Corporate tax rate, I thought it would be interesting to do some comparisons since this plan, like most Republican thinking, makes a number of assumptions without consulting that abstraction called the real world. The source of his numbers is this corporate think tank. For 30 years, tax rates and loopholes for corporations and the wealthy have been expanded to where the they only pay 6% of taxes collected in the U.S. The first question might be to examine where tax rates are by state; Minnesota is at 9.8 % and the rate is high, but it does not tell you what breaks and subsidies there are. It also does not say why it is a much more succesful state then such tax paradises like South Dakota, home of the poorest county in the United States. But let us compare this with states with much lower rates, then look at this to how a society might be contrasted rationally, such as by social measurements like access to health care, education, literacy and poverty rates. There it is a bit more confusing, but we can look at states that compare completely opposite of Minnesota by social measurements; For example Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or Kentucky. These are states with many conditions like the third world, yet have some of the lowest corporate tax rates. In short the world is much more complex than the governor lets on; handing breaks or having low corporate rates is not connected to advancement. In fact, it might show a connection between low rates and low quailty of life. The governor's beliefs, like most of republican thinking, does not work with the real world. After years of budget cutting on the backs of working people, we now have this tired old bucket of drivel. You would think they would come up with something new. In short, it appears the governors model is from down south, with hordes of poor people and a small elite, with no worker's rights and conditions like the third world for much of the population.

Do Unicorns steal the tusks of Narwhal's and other new age theories...

I think it is easily discovered...All unicorns must die !

Range Radio and crazy talk:
Of course all media is in a shuffling state and has been for years, but the talk radio on the range is entering a bizarro world. The am station in Virginia, owned by the local right wing lunatic from Duluth, is best listened to when accompanied by films from the Nuremberg rallies and goose-stepping practice, while that out of Hibbing gives the standard right wing fare...a day to day rehashing of an imaginary world, liberal conspirators preparing children to live off welfare. Knowing a little about the place, I still have not quite figured out just how many whack jobs in the area listen to this drivel. Are they mostly rural? Are they just a skimming of the local elite? Closet cross dressing gun nuts who happen to listen to crazed, obese, multiple divorcees? There is nothing local about it, and there is only one true local station, unfortunately set a little west of here. But as I occasionally listen, I see how the obvious failures of multiple station ownership, lack of local media and lunatic politics come together...Don't bother listening. Just pull some old speeches of Mussolini and at least learn some Italian.

Hopefully non-wonkish;

Minnesota State of the State: This is it?

Listening to the speech was the as if revisiting a bad republican policy document from the Reagan era...no taxes..blah blah blah...the family budget..blah blah...It shows just how ideologically right wing and blind this man is.

His homey family simile might be a great form of communication, but like most of his ideas, it is not based in reality and it does not work. Tucking children in when working two crappy jobs without health care, or working the family budget when it consists of avoiding medical bills, the landlord or foreclosure, or watching your job go up in smoke due to speculation built from the governor's same ideology.

But the government is not a family; it is just a little more complex than that. (By the way, if one continued his way of thinking, his children would be viewed as lazy, irresponsible wastrels leeching off the family income and not earning their own way, rather than, as let's say, children.)

And here is our problem. For three decades now, both at the federal and now state level, there has been a movement, by the wealthy, corporations and right wing true believers to undo the reforms of the New Deal that actually made this a somewhat fair society. More of the tax burden has been placed on working people while the wealthy, investors ( most of whom invest in speculation and not productive capital), corporations have received breaks, loopholes or subsidies in volumes. Supposed centrists like Jesse Ventura, with little understanding of how any of this worked, merely saw it as an equation involving their pocket books, not on where and whom the money was coming from. And now, in this last decade, especially since the Ventura "reforms", we are in yet another mess, and this governor wants to shove the consequences down the road out of pure, blind self and own class serving insanity. By proposing this bag of highly refined manure, he shows what little he knows: In short, he is dealing with a "slump in private spending by reducing public spending". There are alternatives, and here is one proposal, but more could be added.

And decreasing corporate income tax will not solve our budget or make us a a better place to live. The lowest tend to be in states with the worst social statistics, some rivaling third world conditions in the southern U.S.

But that shows where this governor wants to bring us, perhaps. His vision is not of a happy middle class family, but of a small, white elite employing everyone else without benefit of protection or incomes. And that should scare us.