| Number 57 | February 4, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I hate to think of Nygaard Notes as doing nothing more than adding to the clutter of voices going on about the %#^&@!! Presidential campaign in this country. At the same time, it’s such a big part of the media - and cultural - landscape these days that it’s hard to ignore, and maybe we shouldn’t ignore it. Also, I believe that my voice is sufficiently different that I could add some (needed?) perspective that’s pretty hard to find elsewhere. What to do? I’ve already got about 6 columns about it in my head (a reader asked me if I vote, for example) but there are dozens of other columns on other subjects in the pipeline as well. This may be a place where readers can give me some guidance. More about the campaign? Or less? What do you think? Sorry about the late release of last week’s Nygaard Notes. I forget what sort of weak excuse I came up with, but I basically forgot to hit the right buttons when I sent it off, so I only sent it to myself! This made me think that everybody got it. See, this is why I need to get some funding, so I can hire somebody to help me. Then, when this sort of thing happens, both of us can blame the other! As it is, everyone knows that all the screw-ups are my own fault, because there’s only one writer, editor, layout person, and office manager, and that’s me. (My advisors are only responsible for the good ideas that appear, not for how they are presented.) And, yes, thanks to the conscientious readers that alerted me, I am aware of the dopey grammatical errors and typos that have been cropping up the past couple of weeks,. Must be Y2K-related, that’s all I can say. Gotta go, can’t wait to start working on next week’s edition! Nygaard |
President Clinton, speaking in front of “an audience of chief executives and political leaders at the World Economic Forum” in Davos, Switzerland last week. Headline of the Week: The above Quote of the Week came from an article in the New York Times which bore the almost unbearable headline, “Clinton implores elite not to overlook poor.” (At least that was the headline in the local paper’s reprint of the Times’ story.) To their credit, the Times did point out that, to many people who actually live in the Third World, the President’s remarks “would not be accepted as totally sincere.” |
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One last thing to say about the recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report, “Prevalence of Food Insecurity and Hunger, by State, 1996-1998,” which I was going on about a couple of weeks ago. After listing some of the shrinking Federal anti-poverty programs, the report points out that many of the “other public programs that affect food security, such as cash welfare assistance programs, are State programs, and this is increasingly true following recent changes in the [federal] welfare system.” I thought about this while reading the January 2000 issue of “The Alley,” the community newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood here in Minneapolis. In it, state representative Karen Clark remarked that Governor Jesse Ventura has called for “no new funding” in the 2000 state budget. This fits with his overall philosophy of “limited government,” as stated on his official website. He echoes many state governors these days, most of whom are looking at budget surpluses, when he says, “For government to serve the people of our State, it needs to be accountable, responsible and limited; it does not need to be bigger.” This pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy was what I was thinking about two weeks ago when I posed the question “Is our state willing to deal with reality?” Here’s the reality to which I was referring:
Given the human reality of more hunger, and the political reality of “no new funding,” I would like to debate with Governor Ventura on the following point: If, as I would argue, it will take a “bigger” state government - that is, one that spends more money - to feed growing numbers of hungry people in Minnesota, then what sort of philosophy do you have that tells you that our government “does not need to be bigger?” Actually, I have been watching our celebrity Governor for clues as to his philosophy, and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what he is all about. I’ll be writing about this in a future Nygaard Notes. |
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I don’t have room to say too much about it, but I want to comment this week on the front-page article that ran this past Sunday in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) entitled, “Investing in influence at the Capitol; Advocates spend a bundle of time and money making their legislative interests heard.” The newspaper did an analysis of more than 1,000 “interest groups,” and came to the conclusion that “teachers unions, business associations, baseball stadium proponents, and local governments have plowed the most money into Minnesota’s political system” over the past four years. This is an absolutely classic example of getting the facts right but getting the story wrong. If you look at the graphic on the front page, you would see that the “top interest group in Minnesota” in terms of spending is teachers unions, with second place going to “business associations.” Readers could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion, as the reporter apparently did, that unions rival business interests in their political spending in Minnesota. This is exceptionally misleading. It’s hard to say what the Star Trib was trying to do by conducting this study. If they were trying to figure out where the power lies in Minnesota, they certainly went about it in the wrong way. By lumping all of the groups that spend money at the Capitol together under the heading “interest groups,” the paper obscures the crucial issue of class. I know I talk about class a lot, but really, in a society with enormous disparities in wealth and income, how can you talk about power without talking about the haves and the have-nots? The other thing you could do if you really wanted to see who has the power in this state is to look at 1) What do the different interest groups want, and 2) Are they getting it? Next week we’ll do just that. |
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I have argued before that the phenomenon which we know as “budget surpluses” could also be thought of as “under taxing,” or a “lack of will to serve the public.” This would change the debate completely, as it would involve an acknowledgment that the state (or the feds) have a reasonable role to play in spending money for the public welfare. (Those two sentences are a direct quote from myself! in NN #38) I plan to talk about this on a regular basis, since the ascendance of Libertarian ideology is challenging the very idea of “the public welfare” more and more every day, as we “privatize” everything from schools to prisons. Last September I introduced a catchy feature which I called “The Tax Cut Consequence of the Week” as an attempt to make more clear some of the consequences of the current mania to “give the money back to the people,” as legislators like to say, and our Governor likes to shout from the rooftops. Since I have been somewhat delinquent lately in listing them, I will do a little catch-up this week and offer a short list of some of the more disturbing examples of under funding of public services that have been in the news of late. Garbage The December issue of the Seward Profile, our neighborhood newspaper, carried an article with the headline “Who’s picking up the trash? Adopt-a-container program is intended to cover garbage budget shortfall.” As the title indicates, the city doesn’t seem to have enough money to handle the garbage produced by its residents. The shortfall in the city’s solid waste and recycling division is about $1 million this year, expected to double next year. Then, just this week, local officials had their chests puffed up because a national report was just released by Syracuse University and Governing magazine claiming that Minneapolis is the third best city in the country when it comes to “financial management.” Yeah, except that the city can’t manage to come up with enough money to pick up the trash. Why can’t the city come up with the money? When the state legislature passed a package of property tax “relief” in Minnesota in 1997, they put a limit on municipal property taxes “to ensure that its relief was not off-set by local tax increases.” So now we have to “adopt” a trash can. I think I’ll name mine Wally. But at least we’re not “over-taxed.” Courts The January 10th Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) had this headline: “Budget shortfall stretches state trial judges thin, delays cases.” It seems that Minnesota’s court system has a $7.8 million dollar shortfall in the current budget period. Two factors are driving this shortfall: one is the dramatic increase in the number of criminal cases in the state, up 74 percent during the past decade, and the other is the skyrocketing cost of health care benefits for judicial employees. (The fact that both health care costs and the number of “criminals” are soaring are two under-reported scandals that I will talk about in future issues of Nygaard Notes.) What does a $7.8 million shortfall mean? Vacant judgeships are going unfilled for lack of funds, sitting judges are doubling up by shuttling between jurisdictions (just like they did 100 years ago!), and law clerks are fleeing the state courts for more lucrative jobs with private law firms which serve those who can pay. So, those of us who can’t pay now need to line up to wait for “justice.” And justice delayed is justice denied, as they say... Parks Speaking of the courts, we have a really decrepit basketball court in Riverside Park, the park by my house. A neighbor got a serious sprain recently when he stepped into a hole on the asphalt going in for a layup. I don’t even play there any more. And another court is of tennis variety, which is unusable and has degraded so badly that it cannot be resurfaced but likely has to be completely rebuilt. We used to have a soccer field in the park, and I enjoyed playing there with my East African and Southeast Asian neighbors, but the State tore it up to widen the freeway and never really put it back together, so nobody plays there anymore. With the wider freeway cutting through, the park is twice as noisy, so fewer picnics are taking place there. We’ve asked for sound barriers to reduce the noise, but that costs a lot of money, too. Minneapolis has a heckuva park system, and we’re all proud of it, or have been. At a neighborhood meeting last week we learned that this degrading of our parks is due to (you guessed it) reductions in the budget for maintaining the parks. A park board representative told us that they would like to have a regular 20-year cycle for serious park maintenance, but they have had to lengthen the cycle because of a lack of funds. Schools Also in my neighborhood is the West Bank of the University of Minnesota, where can be found the infamous Art Building. I work there part-time, and you wouldn’t believe how depressing it is. There have been plans to replace it since I started working there in the ‘70s, because it was inadequate back then! Now it’s nothing short of an embarrassment, and dangerous to boot. Mice and rats are often seen roaming the halls, emergency measures had to be taken last year to minimize the flaking of asbestos from the walls and ceilings onto the students, and it’s amazing that a firetrap like that hasn’t gone up yet, and several students with it. Needless to say, it’s not an easy place to work, nor to create art. So, in a time of record State budget surpluses, a funding request to replace this building, which is in violation of innumerable codes and regulations, seemed more than reasonable to many of us. However, for some reason Governor Ventura submitted a budget that only allocates one-third of the request put in by the University, and the Art Building wasn’t important to him. (This might have something to do with his comment last week that “Picasso's terrible. He ain't art. . . . I used to do that in kindergarten.”) There will be a demonstration next Wednesday at the Theater building on the West Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota to protest the Governor’s cuts and try to make the case for a new Art Building for the campus. Meanwhile, the Governor is promising another large tax rebate, and permanent tax reductions are again on the agenda at the Capitol. I think I’ll take my rebate and build a new Art Building. What are you going to do with yours? |