Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [73]
We’d had multiple years of prosperity in Minnesota, and there was a projected $4-billion-plus state budget surplus through the first three years of my term. So I was able to provide Minnesotans with three consecutive tax-free rebates. The formula that Pam Wheelock, my finance commissioner, and Matt Smith of the Department of Revenue came up with was to give people a rebate equal to 35 percent of the sales tax a family or individual would have paid out over the previous two years, based on their average earned income.
I’ll never forget the politicians’ reactions to my first State of the State address. Every time I mentioned something about “tax cuts,” the Republicans on one side of the room gave me a standing ovation. When I suggested spending Minnesota’s huge settlement from the tobacco companies on social programs, the Democrats on the other side did the same. I told a journalist afterward it reminded me of one of those old “tastes great, less filling” beer commercials that I used to do.
When push came to shove, the Republican-dominated House didn’t want anything except an income-tax rebate, and the Democrat-controlled Senate decided to support my proposal. With less than two weeks left in the legislative session, they were still deadlocked when I called the leadership in for a closed-door meeting. Actually, I threatened to lock Roger Moe and Steve Sviggum in the statehouse library with my gaseous bulldog, Franklin. “If I feed him a little bit of hamburger,” I told the press, “I got a feeling we’ll have a deal in about a half hour.”
I don’t like cutting backroom deals, but sometimes you have no choice. We ended up providing the largest tax rebate that any state had ever given (a married couple earning $50,000 a year received a check for more than a thousand dollars), based on the sales-tax calculations. The Republicans got their income-tax cuts, the Democrats got an extra $100 million for education spending, and I got the $60 million I wanted for initial funding of light-rail transit.
Everybody came out happy. For the moment.
One of the major issues that inspired me to run for governor was Minnesota’s complicated property-tax system, which I’d vowed to change. In my first State of the State, I said: “Let’s face it. We’ve lost any logic to this system. Property taxes no longer are tied to the services that are delivered. We have created a so-called progressive tax based on the value of the property. It punishes people for doing the right thing. If I keep up my property, my value and taxes go up, even though I don’t need as many local services as the property that has been allowed to deteriorate and needs more inspections, fire protection, or police patrols.”
To me, it also came down to taxation without representation. You may have heard about Minnesota being the “land of ten thousand lakes.” A lot of people like myself live in the city, but own a little lake cabin to spend their weekends in. That’s a tradition as engrained in Minnesota as surfing is in California. You don’t vote in the area where you own a second home, yet the local bureaucrats could still raise your property taxes as a levy to pay for public education. Whenever they needed money for their school district, they’d dump it onto the cabin owners—who were, unfairly, footing the bill there, as well as where their own kids attended school in the fall.
So, in 2001, I came up with a plan for the state to start paying the full costs of public education out of a general fund, rather than from local property taxes—which would then become smaller, simpler, fairer, and more truly local. To help pay for this switch, I proposed adding a sales tax onto many services that weren’t subject to it—but, at the same time, lowering the overall sales tax from 6.5 to 6 percent. And we’d still come in with a balanced budget. Well, this time the Republicans loved me instead of the Democrats.
Here’s the thing about sales taxes