MINI-BLOG: 2011 BUDGET BATTLES

The "Social Media" - Twitter, Facebook, et al, is on every news person's lips and fingertips. OMG, WTF,... literary scholars are shocked, shocked that language changes. So must a Blog (Website-Log) from time to time. A limit of 140 characters won't do. My newspaper won't publish over 300 words. (That's Brainerd, not Aitkin)

And a posting on Facebook of more than three or four lines is... BORING! Without a digital photo.

So, on to the Federal Budget, the Minnesota Budget, and the Voter.

The USA pays a slender amount of taxes - local, state, and federal - in comparison to all other industrialized nations. The State of Minnesota - in the last 12 years - has fallen into the middle of the pack in its spending, compared with the other 49 states. We are nowhere near becoming a Cold Mississippi or another Nebraska, but we are moving in that direction

The BIG items in Washington are War (now known as "Defense'), Medical Care for the Over-65, Disabled, and Poor, Social-funded Pensions (Security), and Transportation (air, highway, rail, and space).

The Major State expenditures are Public Schools and Colleges, Human Services (nursing homes, women and child support payments, hospitals), Roads and Bridges, Prisons, Conservation and Parks.

We are the most prosperous people in history! But for several decades we have squandered our largess. The wealthiest have snatched the gains of our rising productivity and invention. Working people and ordinary folks have lost ground - seen an actual flattening of their incomes.

War spending and tax breaks for the upper class have robbed most of us.

Let's be clear. One Trillion Dollars a year - for a decade - has bought us little Defense, a lot of regret, and an enormous loss of opportunity to become a more perfect society.

So in Washington, in the "Defense Department" - let's cut the numbers of aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, tanks and artillery. We won't fight any more 20th Century wars in which all of these weapons were so necessary.

In Minnesota - let's give Gov. Dayton one more individual income tax bracket, so that the wealthiest Minnesotans can pay a fairer share of their wealth towards the public good.

What about these wealthy Minnesotans who may decide to move away and take their businesses with them when their state taxes rise a little? Looking for a poorer state where they can "keep more of what is theirs?"

Well, they are not the ones I want as my neighbors. OMG that's 402 words!