Republicans' Dangerous Word of the Day: Compromise

Compromise shouldn't be a hard word to understand.  When you negotiate just about anything, the give and take of compromise is a given for the process. 

But it seems that the GOP Party and GOP legislative leadership are looking at compromise as an impossibility in current legislative matters. The Minnesota GOP Party Chair Tony Sutton said as much in a letter to all of the media:

"It is certainly not reasonable to expect people who understand the dangers of an unrestrained government to accept the status quo notion of "compromise."        

So compromising is now dangerous.  

The legislative bills that were sent to Governor Dayton (who vetoed them), eliminated GAMC (health care for the most vulnerable citizens); it cut transit (leaving rail and bus projects in doubt); it had controversial items in the Veteran's Bill (which might cause increases in fees); and it cut Local Government Aid severely - especially in the largest cities (which means more, yes more, property tax increases).

Finding new revenue to lessen the need for cuts like that is "dangerous", at least according to Sutton.

And the revenue they object to is a top tier tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of Minnesotans.  And why do they object?  Because these are the "job creators." When in fact they are not. It is small business owners that create the most jobs. A Minnesota Budget Project analysis quoted the Department of Revenue thusly:

Some have raised concerns about the potential impact that an income tax increase on high-income households would have on small business owners. It actually is difficult to know the impact on small businesses per se, but there is data on “pass-through” income, which is the kind of business income that shows up on the individual income tax. Department of Revenue analysis finds that only 11 percent of tax returns with pass-through income would be impacted by the Governor’s fourth tier proposal.

And that was before Governor Dayton compromised (gasp!) by reducing his call for higher income tax increases. In his latest proposal, he eliminated more small business owners from being affected. 

So, I'm trying to understand why "compromise" is the dirty word that GOP Party Chair Sutton seems to think it is. Minnesotans in general, (63%) seem to be looking for a combination of revenue and cuts as a recent Minnesota Poll pointed out.

So, the session ends without that compromise as Mr. Sutton wished. And now we will spend the month of June trying to figure out how we fix this before the government has to shut down on July 1.

Since "compromise" is off the table according to the Republicans, where do we go from here?

-Dave Mindeman