Less than 7 hours remain until a possible state government shutdown and I’m still not sure if I’ll be reporting to work tomorrow. GOP leaders spoke to reporters about an hour ago and expressed optimism that a shutdown could be avoided, but it’s in their interest to project optimism. Unlike Governor Dayton, they are up for election next year and voters may take out their frustration with this gridlock on them. I’m skeptical that a deal will be reached tonight, but I’d be happy to proven wrong. <\/p>\n
What frustrates me most about this mess is that any final deal is unlikely to resolve the state’s structural deficit. This deal will probably include short-term fixes (Medicaid surcharges, accounting shifts, maybe gambling revenue) that will only patch up the hole until the next election. In two years, we’ll probably face another deficit and–depending on the composition of the Legislature at the time–another round of political brinkmanship over the continued operation of state government. A couple of decades ago, no state political leader would even contemplate allowing a shutdown to occur. Now, it’s becoming just another bargaining chip in service of ideology. This isn’t the kind of sane, responsible governance that has characterized Minnesota for so long. <\/p>\n
We should be better than this. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Less than 7 hours remain until a possible state government shutdown and I’m still not sure if I’ll be reporting to work tomorrow. GOP leaders spoke to reporters about an hour ago and expressed optimism that a shutdown could be avoided, but it’s in their interest to project optimism. Unlike Governor Dayton, they are up […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-LT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}