Brehm: Actually, the DFL deserves complete credit for the budgetary mess Minnesota finds itself in

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Recently on these opinion pages, Eric Bernstein artfully made the argument (”Minnesota’s fiscal predicament is a bipartisan problem with bipartisan solutions,” Dec. 13) that the Democrats who have controlled every aspect of state government these past two years are not entirely to blame for Minnesota’s looming $5 billion budget deficit. Republicans, he wrote (I presume with a straight face), would have made the fiscal picture much worse. But now, after one of the most divisive and partisan legislative sessions in state history and ruled only by iron-fisted DFLers, Bernstein says both parties should share in the fault, embrace in one giant bearhug and become “the state that works together.”

If you buy that, I have a bridge to sell you.

To be sure, we do need more unity and compromise in our politics here. And with North Star state voters having broken the Democratic trifecta at the ballot box, Republicans have a role and a responsibility to help make the tough choices to steer us away from the impending fiscal cliff and return some financial sanity to St. Paul. Minnesota for too long has fed an insatiable appetite for taxing and spending, and the resulting bloat is showing.

While I agree with Bernstein that cheap political blame games are a waste of time, accountability is important when it comes to good government, and his hazy message does a disservice to Minnesotans who deserve for the record to remain clear about who led us from a $17 billion surplus to a projected $5 billion deficit in just a few years. Without a single Republican vote, mind you, in 2023, the DFL trifecta set our state’s balance sheet on a certain course into the red by increasing government spending an unsustainable 40%. Yes, we face many problems that politicians from both sides played a part in making, but Minnesota’s ugly upcoming balance sheet isn’t one of them.

In 2023, Republicans, including this one, warned that the DFL’s spending spree was untenable. What family or business can nearly double its budget in a single year, make permanent many of those increases, and not expect serious financial repercussions down the road? But Gov. Tim Walz, seemingly eager for the national spotlight, apparently thought “consequences be damned,” sidelined Republicans from negotiations altogether, and, with his slim DFL majorities in the House and Senate marching in lockstep behind him, dropped a ticking time bomb into future state balance sheets — one that’s now about to go boom.

Minnesotans will need to decide what to do about that troublesome monetary record when it comes time in 2026 for us to pick a governor. But for now, Bernstein is right that our focus should remain on finding substantive solutions.

One that needs to be taken off the table at the outset is any form of tax or fee increase. Period. Minnesotans are already one of the most heavily taxed people in the nation, particularly here in the Twin Cities. Raising them even further will not only make life in the land of 10,000 lakes more unaffordable and less appealing, but it will push even more high-income earners, which state coffers rely heavily on already, out of Minnesota altogether, ultimately reducing our tax base and revenues even further, a trend already well underway as I have warned about in a previous column.

The good news is that paring back state spending some shouldn’t be terribly difficult given how it’s so recently and dramatically ballooned.

We can start by eliminating the automatic increases tied to inflation that DFLers added to the largest line item in Minnesota’s budget: K-12 funding, which constitutes over a third of all state spending. While our classrooms should have the resources they need to function well, since the start of the 2019-20 school year, according to the Department of Education, Minnesota public school enrollment has dropped annually, cumulatively within that timespan around 2.7%, or by about 23,200 students. If the number of children attending public schools is falling each year, why are their appropriations automatically rising? Legislators should set budgets and funding priorities based on actual need and available resources, just as Minnesota families and businesses must do.

Our state also simply cannot afford to continue to provide college tuition support and generous health insurance subsidies for some of the 81,000 illegal immigrants living here. Doing so is an affront to American sovereignty and serves as a magnet attracting migrants who broke U.S. law to get across our borders. Undocumented men and women should be treated humanely and with kindness, but their problematic status should not be endorsed and encouraged by long-term government entitlement programs paid for by law-abiding taxpayers.

Finally, like every big entity looking at a rough financial future, a personnel belt-tightening is in order. The 2023 legislative session alone added thousands of new hires to the already titanic workforce employed by the state, which constitutes the third-largest employer in Minnesota. To make matters worse, many state employees got a generous 5.5% pay bump last year and an additional 4.5% raise this year — wage growth that is outpacing the private sector. And according to the Center of the American Experiment, Democrats have also added an astonishing 173 state employees working in DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) alone. I am all for racial, cultural and political diversity within our institutions, but we don’t need so many full-time roles to accomplish that. While there are thousands of talented and hardworking state employees who serve our citizenry well, Minnesota’s bureaucracy has grown too large. It can and must be thinned.

One easy way to do this is to require that state workers return to the office, as the rest of us have. Downtown St. Paul sure could use the boost in foot traffic. Some warn that doing so would result in resignations from some state government roles. Maybe that could be a welcome thing?

During the upcoming 2026 elections, voters must remember which party eviscerated Minnesota’s once-healthy state ledger and ignore attempts at political revisionist history. But in the meantime, we do need to focus on answers to the troublesome budget forecast. Every one of them should involve cutting the state’s reckless rate of spending.