True North

Whenever the Minnesota DFL wants to yank at voters’ heartstrings, they invoke the “Minnesota Miracle” - the period in the sixties and seventies where Democrats and liberal Republicans (which was most of them at that time) imposed a slew of government programs and wealth redistributions, and claimed credit for an economic and social leap forward (in a state that had already been amply blessed with brains, resources and geographic accidents, and would have grown like a weed anyway).

Oh, there was definitely a “miracle” in Minnesota - which had been a poor, hardscrabble backwater state beholden to mining, lumber, agriculture and milling until the early 20th Century.  Minnesota did grow immensely; it would have grown, I suspect, had government merely gotten out of the way, too.

But government - and today, almost forty years later, big-government advocates - claim the “Miracle” as their own.

And to them, the “miracle” was about one thing; being happy to pay for a better Minnesota.

And they’re baaaaaaaack:

[Complaints that schools aren’t “underfunded”] and the sad state of the economy haven’t stopped DFL legislators from pushing what they hope will be one of the biggest school funding boosts in recent history — and one likely to involve a tax increase.

The plan is dubbed the “New Minnesota Miracle” after the state’s 1971 initiative that shifted most school funding from local property taxes to the state.

The new plan calls for $2.5 billion more a year for K-12 education, though it could be phased in over a number of years. That figure includes $400 million earmarked to lower property taxes for homeowners who have watched their tax bills go up after local school funding requests were approved at the polls. The state now spends more than $7 billion a year, or about 40 percent of the state’s total general fund budget, on K-12 education.

Calling it a “new Minnesota Miracle”, of course, is putting lipstick on a pig; it’s just another DFL tax increase, and yet another sop to another powerful DFL special interest.  The plan has no real education reforms; indeed, I think it’s fair to say that it’s at least partly a reaction to the erosion of enrollment caused by the limited school choice that Minnesotans have gotten in the past couple of decades.  But schools will stay the same; they’ll just have more of your money.

Look, Education Minnesota and the DFL (pardon the redundancy); show us some reforms.  Not just windowdressing, mind you, but reforms, ideas that change things for the better; better still, accomplish something, like increasing graduation rates; then declare a “miracle”.

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.