In a bizarre perversion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inspirational platitude, the only thing today’s Minnesota DFL Party has to offer is fear itself.

The DFL (and its chanting points repeater blogs MNPublius, mnpACT and Minnesota “Progressive” Project, among others, not to mention the regional mainstream media) are tossing about the figure “$6.2 Billion” as the defict the next Administration and Legislature will need to deal with.

This, of course, is the first step in the Left’s big-government-through-fear playbook:

1. Note a gap between planned spending and available revenue.
2. Warn of the “Service” cuts involved in cutting planned spending.
3. Ram that warning home with threats to gut police and fire departments, along with draconian cuts among teachers (while, mysteriously, leaving administators, pensions, convention and visitors bureaux, human rights offices and other such waste untouched) if politicians at all levels don’t raise the revenue needed by any means necessary – which means, inevitably, tax hikes.

As Tom Emmer pointed out over and over during his gubernatorial campaign, it was nonsense, of course.  The “budget” against which revenue left a “deficit” was not a “budget”, it was an “autopilot” adjustment of the existing budget based on increasing existing “services” by the amount the DFL-dominated bureaucracy says they’ll need to be increased.  It’s like setting a family budget according to your kids’ Christmas wish lists.

Gary Gross at LFR breaks it down (with emphasis added):

…what’s being called a $5,000,000,000 deficit is based on last biennium’s budget tails, which were wildly oversized vs. the projected revenue. According to the figure from the campaign trail, Minnesota is projected to take in almost $33,000,000,000 compared with $30,700,000,000 for the current biennium.

When omnibus spending bills are put together, the spreadsheet contains the amount that will be spent for that biennium and the amount that they’d like to spend in the next biennium. The second biennium request is called a budget tail. It’s what the MMB people are required to use for their budget projections. It isn’t something that must be spent.

The media don’t tell you this because – well, I’m not sure.  Maybe they figure that everyone is a government wonk and they already know all this. 

The DFL and its chanting-points-bots won’t you because, again, all they have to offer is fear.   And because an ignorant citizenry is a DFL citizenry.

It’s rare that they spend what the tails call for. In fact, the legislature can just as easily choose to spend significantly less. In fact, I suspect that’s what will happen, partially because Republicans have a number of reforms that will save significant amounts of money, starting with King Banaian’s reform to ZBB and Steve Gottwalt’s Healthy Minnesota Plan.

Those 2 reforms will save Minnesota taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars this biennium.

Your mission this next month, before the next session (which starts on January 3, a month from today): when you hear your neighbors and co-workers worrying about “the six billion dollar deficit”, set them straight.  And tell them to call their Reps and Senators; the GOP ones need the encouragement to do the right thing; the DFL ones need to know that the long electoral knives of last autumn aren’t nearly done yet.