I read it suggested that if Minneapolis wants to spend money on something, it should tax itself for it. Well, there are lots of things I see wrong with that. First, the Minneapolis city government cannot tell WHO it is providing services for. When it spends money on traffic control, how does it assure it is ONLY serving residents, since we don't issue travel permits at the borders to non-residents passing through. Second, right now, the only tax that the state allows us to collect and keep is the property tax. There is no way that the expenses of the city should rest on property tax alone. MOST Minnesotans realized that decades ago. That is why we have LGAs. As with all policy decisions, we didn't have 100 percent on board with that one, but I notice Pawlenty only got 44 percent, so there's no evidence right now that his decision to implement this philosophy has majority support in Minnesota. Plus, I do think you'll hear the commercial property owners scream if you boost their taxes enough to pay for every expense that Minneapolis government has. In short, I think this idea is a faulty one, and the flaws were recognized long ago. And I doubt that if you polled most businesses and residents IN Minneapolis, you would find a majority signing onto the idea that our little territory should act like an island in the state.
The truth is we should just have a lot fewer governments. Let the state collect the money and spend it for MOST things, leaving only to Minneapolis what the property tax can reasonably support. And get rid of this mass of expensive and redundant governments. Then maybe, for one thing, highways will be built soundly, and not be one political compromise after another. Why do Americans, who spew hatred toward government more than any other people in the WORLD, have so MANY of them. It's like the Woody Allen joke. "Isn't the food here terrible?" "Yes, and the portions are so SMALL!"
Arrests
Thanks again to Lt. Reinhardt for injecting some reality into this law enforcement debate. Too often we hear sweeping generalizations seemingly based on an emotional perception of what is going on. The fact of the matter is that even when gang activity in Minneapolis was peaking, crime nationwide was steadily dropping. I recall that some of that spike in Minneapolis came from immigration of gang members from points East and West. It may indeed have been a sign of SUCCESS of the Clinton program. Hardcore violent criminals may have heard Minneapolis was a soft touch. They eventually found it was not so, and in the afthermath, Minneapolis is STILL safer than most medium cities! Which means Chief Olson and his men and women did exactly what we pay them for. We don't pay them to be on top of migratory patterns of the violent underclass. We pay them to respond. They responded. I'll be reminding people of that for decades because I can just predict that the canard that somehow our police did a bad job is bound to resurface. And by the way, "diversion" is not a bad thing. We pay less for corrections than other states and are more PEACEFUL than states that "lock em up".
________________________________________ Jim Mork Cooper Neighborhood Longfellow Community Minneapolis, MN We think. You'll like it here. And we're more fun than a barrel of Norwegians
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