One of the greatest reasons I wanted to serve in the Legislature when I ran in 1972 was the "Minnesota Miracle" bill passed a year earlier by a conservative GOP majority and a liberal Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party governor, Wendell Anderson.
The "Minnesota Miracle" tax law increased income and sales taxes and created Local Government Aid and School Aid to help cities, counties and school districts fund services equally, as the state constitution required. That was especially critical when it came to education funding. The law kept regressive property taxes on businesses and homes as low as possible.
I defeated our legislator who voted against that bill.
My political philosophy was based on economic and social justice because countries that did not have such systems turned to communism and other undesirable governmental systems. The former Soviet Union was the first to "choose" Marxism because only the czar and the church and its friends had everything, it seemed. The peasants and workers had almost nothing.
From 1973 to 1979, Minnesota's state budget was stable, and we lawmakers were able to fulfill our obligation as stipulated in the state constitution. But in 1979, U.S. Rep. Al Quie became our governor and brought a commissioner of revenue from the East Coast. He proposed dismantling the "Minnesota Miracle." Quie was able to get his tax bill through both houses with a $710 million income tax cut.
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I quit the Legislature in 1980 because I knew the state was going to go to the bad old days of high real estate taxes, etc.
Between 1979 and 1982, when he left the governorship, Quie had to call seven or eight special legislative sessions to fix the state budget. In 1985, when I returned to St. Paul, Speaker David Jennings gained a Republican majority in the Minnesota House and promised to cut income taxes by $41 billion. He succeeded to pass it 200 to 1 -- mine was the lone "no" -- and Gov. Rudy Perpich signed it.
I knew the law was political because not even a year later the state was $800 million in the hole. In 1987, Perpich proposed conforming to President Reagan's tax reform, and Minnesota lost another$680 million.
In 1991, Gov. Arne Carlson came and had to propose to increase the sales tax to 6.5 percent and impose a sales tax on health-care providers to cover Minnesota Care insurance for low-income working Minnesotans.
During the 1990s, the state and national economy picked up, mostly due to President Clinton's federal balanced-budget policy. Minnesota had a good budget reserve and surplus. However, when the GOP gained a majority in the Minnesota House and Jesse Ventura became governor, Majority Leader Tim Pawlenty, with Ventura's agreement, rebated our revenue and, worse, cut income taxes by almost $2 billion per biennium. When Pawlenty took office as governor in 2003, the state had a $4.5 billion deficit.
The above income tax cuts amounted to about $4.4 billion, which is almost the projected Minnesota deficit this year. The negative economy will increase that shortfall even further before the 2009 legislative session ends. Most other states have made unwise tax cuts like Minnesota and are in similar positions.
The above mistakes are especially unfair to local units of governments and schools, which depend on help from St. Paul and Washington to provide economic and social justice to the people -- as they deserve in a just democratic society.
MIKE JAROS of Duluth retired last year after more than 30 years in the Minnesota Legislature. In submitting this commentary to the News Tribune, he described himself as a "dead-duck politician."
