Minnesota Lawyer
Phil Krinkie
The Taxpayers League of Minnesota is airing a new television commercial on cable stations calling on DFL Gov. Mark Dayton to negotiate a budget without tax increases. The ad asserts that state government spending would increase by 12 percent in the next biennium under the $34 billion budget that was passed by the Republican-led Legislature.
“Gov. Dayton doesn’t want to compromise,” says one of the individuals featured in the spot. “He wants higher taxes and billions more in state spending.”
The figure used by the Taxpayers League does not include roughly $2.3 billion in one-time federal stimulus dollars that propped up the state’s budget in the current biennium. “To talk about the amount of money that the Legislature was able to use from stimulus dollars as base spending is absurd,” said Phil Krinkie, president of the Taxpayers League, in introducing the ad. “It’s no different than if you won the Powerball or you had an inheritance from a relative who passed away.”
Krinkie would not provide a dollar figure for the ad buy, stating only that it was far more than $10,000. The liberal advocacy group Alliance for a Better Minnesota is spending $500,000 to $1 million on television and radio spots backing Dayton’s budget stance.
Krinkie said the notion that Dayton offered a significant compromise by reducing his proposed tax increase on the state’s wealthiest residents by $1.8 billion last month is a fallacy. He also criticized the governor for failing to detail where he would make cuts to account for that lack of additional revenue. “It was a mirage of budget reductions,” Krinkie said.
