eUpdate - 6/1/07

Why donate to the Taxpayers League of Minnesota?

Because without your support this year Minnesotans would have seen billions of dollars in new taxes or worse, a prolonged and destructive special legislative session that would have sent our national tax ranking back into the top ten.

But with your help, the Taxpayers League and a small group of conservatives were able to hold back the liberal tax and spend agenda. You know the liberals will be back when the Legislature reconvenes in February. And you know they will make another attempt to make Minnesota's income tax rate the highest in the nation. So until then we need to prepare for their next assault - we need to make sure that Minnesota taxpayers can rest easy knowing their life, liberty and property are safe for few more months.

Over the last ten years, the Taxpayers League of Minnesota has been at the center of the struggle to keep taxpayers from giving an ever greater share of their hard earned money to government. We can't claim to have won every fight, but ask yourself this: without the Taxpayers League, who would do the fighting?

If you're a past supporter and are coming back to help us again, thank you. And if you're a new supporter of the Taxpayers League, welcome. Your help is absolutely critical to our efforts as we promote a responsible agenda in Minnesota. But please stay tuned. The tax grab never stops.

As always, we are delighted to call you a friend of the taxpayer.

eUpdate - 6/1/07

Taxpayers League of Minnesota eUpdate

1. Taxpayers League Live! with David Strom.
2. Your life, liberty and property are now safe – until February 2008 anyway.
3. So you think a veto of the tax bill is going to hurt your city?
4. America’s poor: You just can’t keep them down anymore.
5. Searching for Climate Change: A More Temperate Take on Global Warming.

1. Taxpayers League Live! with David Strom.
Tune in this Saturday to AM 1280 The Patriot from 9 – 11 am when David will be joined by Regina Herzlinger and Tom Emmer. Dr. Herzlinger is a Manhattan Institute Center for Medical Progress Senior Fellow and the author of the forthcoming book Who Killed Health Care: America's $2 Trillion Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure. She was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and is widely recognized for her innovative research in health care.
Emmer, a second-term State Representative from Delano and Deputy Minority Leader, will give us the House GOP wrap on the 2007 legislative session and what we may be able to expect in 2008.

2. V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!!!!!!!!

It was the cherry topping the whipped cream and Sundae: Governor Pawlenty's Veto of the Tax Bill. With a stroke of his pen Governor Pawlenty put the final touch to a remarkable legislative session. Five months ago the liberals were on the march, conservatives on defense. Billions of dollars in tax increases were proposed, and billions more in new spending.

Now, with all the dust cleared, Pawlenty and the small band of Republicans won every major battle of the Legislative session.

Thanks to you, and the Taxpayers League of course.

This session was a total victory for the taxpayers. Spending actually will increase less quickly than even was proposed originally by Governor Pawlenty. No tax-increases passed the legislature. A transportation bill that included no less than 6 tax increases was vetoed by the Governor, and that veto was sustained with every Republican standing firmly with the Governor. Even the ridiculous liberal bonding bill was stopped in its tracks.

Simply put, conservatives won just about every major battle this session, and the liberals lost. What a difference 5 months makes!

Of course winning just these battles will not be enough--we have to fight again another day. But at least for now the Taxpayers can rest assured that fiscal conservatives are on the march.

3. “Burbs paying big bucks for big-city ambitions.”
According to recent press reports, city managers and local elected officials are furiously preparing for the apocalypse now that Governor Pawlenty has vetoed the tax bill and removed them from the Local Government Aid teat. Of course that’s what local governments want you to think. But according to the story linked above from last weekend’s Star Tribune, local governments all over the metro are shelling out big bucks for amenities normally reserved for their larger cousins. Tricky, tricky local governments. Crying poverty one day and building community centers, swimming pools and multi-modal transit hubs the next.

4. The Rise Of the Bottom Fifth: How to Build on the Gains Of Welfare Reform by Ron Haskins
From Tuesday’s Washington Post:
“Imagine a line composed of every household with children in the United States, arranged from lowest to highest income. Now, divide the line into five equal parts. Which of the groups do you think enjoyed big increases in income since 1991? If you read the papers, you probably would assume that the bottom fifth did the worst. After all, income inequality in America is increasing, right?
“Wrong. According to a Congressional Budget Office study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from 1991 to 2005 than all other groups except the top fifth. Despite the recession of 2001, the bottom fifth had a 35 percent increase in income (adjusted for inflation), compared with around 20 percent for the second, third and fourth fifths. (The top fifth had about a 50 percent increase.) “Earnings up, welfare down -- that's the definition of reducing welfare dependency in America.”
To read the rest, click here.

5. Another luncheon forum presented by the Center of the American Experiment.
Join the Center of the American Experiment for a luncheon forum in which Prof. John R. Christy – one of a handful of scientists to actually build "data sets of climate variation and change from scratch" – talks about how finding "dramatic changes in climate systems" is really quite difficult. Dr. Christy is professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he and a colleague have collected and analyzed global temperature information from satellite-observed microwave data going back to 1979. For this breakthrough, he was awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. A contributor and lead author to several reports of the U.N. International Panel on Global Climate Change, Professor Christy earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois.
To register online click here or call (612) 338-3605.

The Taxpayers League of Minnesota's E Update is written by Mark Giga

The Taxpayers Legaue of Minnesota

A non-partisan, non-profit grassroots taxpayer advocacy organization for Minnesota