Blog
February 15, 2012
While government needs taxes to run, not all taxes are equal in their effect. A new report from the Tax Foundation–State and Local Sales Taxes in 2012–evaluates the burden of state and local sales taxes across the United States. It shows great variation. State sales tax rates range from 0 percent (Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, Oregon), to 7.25 percent (California). Some states have local sales taxes, while others do not. And of course states define the “base” differently: Some tax food and clothing while others don’t.
If you look only at state-level taxes, Minnesota has the seventh-highest burden in the land, behind California, Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.
February 13, 2012
Should a state-focused think tank care about ObamaCare? How about state legislators? You betcha! That’s why the Minnesota Free Market Institute at the Center of the American Experiment has joined in a legal brief on the question of whether Congress can require you to purchase health insurance.
January 6, 2012
In her watershed 1993 article in the Atlantic, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote of how “every time the issue of family structure has been raised, the response has been first controversy, then retreat, and finally silence.” That decisively had been the case 28 years earlier in the aftermath of the 1965 release of what quickly became known as the “Moynihan Report” on family breakdown in the African American community. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, never once attributed blame to African Americans themselves, but rather, indicted the nation’s history of slavery and racism. His analysis, in fact, was exquisitely progressive, laying the conceptual foundation, for example, for affirmative action.
December 24, 2011
The Golden Strings—a group Variety once called the “longest running violin show in the world”—first appeared at the old Radisson Hotel in downtown Minneapolis on Valentine’s Day 1963. To be more exact, they performed in its famous Flame Room. They continued playing there until the hotel closed in 1981, consistently before big and appreciative audiences, as more than two million people heard the legendary group at the landmark hotel over nearly two decades.
December 15, 2011
In a column for Bloomberg, Virginia Postrel explains how “federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.”
She calls the idea heretical, which it may be to some. But anyone who understands anything about economics should immediately nod their heads in agreement. I think I audibly uttered, “No duh.” There’s just no question that tuition will increase when, thanks to government grants or low-interest loans, people have more money to spend on tuition.
November 22, 2011
About 30 years ago I wrote a two-part package about Thanksgiving for the old Minneapolis Star, the first piece running right before the holiday and the second shortly afterwards. As many recall, and as many others who weren’t around at the time don’t, the Star was the Cowles family’s afternoon paper in town and the Tribune was the morning paper. The two combined into a single morning paper soon afterwards.
After a brief introduction, the first article was actually a questionnaire, with open-ended questions about television viewing on Thanksgiving. More specifically, it asked a series of questions about watching football games on that day. As with now, the Detroit Lions had long hosted an early game on Thanksgiving (routinely against the Green Bay Packers), and the Dallas Cowboys hosted another game later in the afternoon.
November 11, 2011
As you may recall, another Texas governor not too long ago – someone who actually did wind up in the White House – also was known to occasionally commit syntactical violence when speaking in front of big crowds with cameras, among other situations and places.
November 4, 2011
After years of threatening to sue Minnesota over the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007, the state of North Dakota finally filed suit in federal court.
October 24, 2011
Herman Cain recently said he was not terribly familiar with neoconservatism. For a serious presidential candidate, this frankly was not impressive. Then, again, one might fairly grant that the term has been conceived in different ways over the last nearly five decades, with at least one definition used more as an indictment than a description. One might also grant that only folks who type for a living – not successful captains of industry – generally have the time to keep track and decipher such matters.
October 20, 2011
Earlier this week, Rep. Ryan Winkler wrote in the Star Tribune in favor of the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board’s recent decision to broaden disclosure requirements on nonprofits that work to support or oppose ballot questions. My column last week made the general case for how disclosure of individual names and contributions can infringe on First Amendment rights to speech, association, and privacy of belief. I noted the real risk of harassment when individuals speak out on various issues. In a follow-up blog, I noted how it seems to be conservatives that are the most likely to be harassed these days, whether the issue is gay marriage, right-to-work, affirmative action or something else.
