Minnesota’s state government shut down Friday.
Chris Lapakko, one of the 22,000 state workers laid off, took the occasion to make a point. He pitched a tent on the Capitol grounds in St. Paul and told passersby, “This is what small government looks like.”
Gov. Mark Dayton wants to close the state’s $5 billion budget gap by raising taxes on the rich as well as trimming back on state spending. The Republican-controlled Legislature refused to go along. No tax increases, they insisted.
The deadlock persisted past the deadline so the state sent its workers home and closed its doors. Minnesota state parks were closed on the eve of the three-day Fourth of July weekend. No one answered the phone at the Capitol. State-financed road repairs came to a halt.
The list of what the state of Minnesota no longer does for the people of Minnesota will grow longer by the hour.
Minnesota is giving the nation practical instruction in what happens when politicians decide that it is more important to stick stubbornly to their political dogma than it is to serve the citizens.
What is happening today in Minnesota could happen nationwide on Aug. 3 — and for basically the same, ideological reasons. Republicans in Congress say they won’t vote to raise the debt limit if the Democrats insist that tax loopholes and tax breaks must be eliminated as part of the deal.
Democrats say the Republicans are protecting their financial supporters, the “millionaires and the billionaires,” and argue that it is better to tax the rich than to make deep cuts in public programs that will throw thousands of public workers out of jobs and worsen the recession.
WHILE THESE stories made headlines in St. Paul and elsewhere, another story hit the headlines. Equilar, an executive compensation data firm based in Redwood City, Calif., announced that the median pay for top executives of 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to be a 23 percent gain from 2009. (That was about how much your family income rose, right?)
The executive pay data firm reported that Philippe P. Dauman, chief executive of Viacom, made $84.5 million last year to top the list. Other media execs did pretty well, too. Leslie Moonves of the CBS corporation got a 32 percent raise and made $56.9 million. Brian L. Roberts of Comcast Corporation and Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney Company each received pay packages valued at $28 million.
Target — the discount chain — paid its CEO $23.5 million. There are more than 100 equally mind-boggling examples of outlandish pay packages for the guys and gals at the top.
Well, you get the picture. The chief executive officers of all 200 of those corporations made millions while wages and benefits for the rest of the U.S. population disappeared entirely, shrank or, at best, stagnated.
Despite this screaming inequity in the way the nation’s wealth is being distributed, Republicans in Minnesota were willing to throw state workers out in the street and shut down government offices there rather than raise taxes on upper bracket earners. Republicans in Congress seem poised to be equally reckless at the national level.
The consequences of shutting down the U.S. government by refusing to raise the debt limit would be far more severe. Shutting off Medicaid and other support services in Minnesota will be disastrous. Shutting off Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and all of the rest of the services the federal government provides to the people would be catastrophic.
It happened in Minnesota. It can happen in Washington.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
