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.