State and local taxes and spending KNSI: Minnesota’s budget surplus grows to a projected $2.4 billion, fueling debate over spending Kare 11: Minnesota budget surplus estimate tops $2 billion Rochester…
Last week, Xcel Energy announced it is seeking to install 1,200 megawatts (MW) of new wind capacity in southwest Minnesota by 2027, which would constitute a 25 percent increase in…
The Minneapolis City Council demonstrated once again this week why seating activists in government is counterproductive. This Council makeup is widely viewed as dysfunctional, and its rejection of a…
Historians essentially agree the bloody Dakota uprising of 1862 still stands as the most consequential event in Minnesota history. The media’s attention generally focuses on the December anniversary of the…
An administrative law judge (ALJ) is considering proposed changes to Minnesota’s K-12 academic standards in social studies. He will weigh the changes against statutory requirements for revising academic standards and…
It turns out that giving away free food to poor hungry children was an extremely lucrative enterprise in 2021. I’ve mentioned before how hundreds of nonprofits sprung up overnight (or…
A recent K-12 student enrollment forecast published by Statista, a data gathering and visualization platform, projects Minnesota K-12 public school enrollment will decline nearly two percent (1.8 percent) from 2021…
Earlier this month, I was invited to present on the results of American Experiment’s modeling on the impact of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on carbon dioxide emissions on new…
As proposed changes to Minnesota’s K-12 social studies standards await review by an administrative law judge, I think it’s important to reiterate why American Experiment is opposed to the revisions,…
In a recent update, Minnesota Management and Budget announced that Minnesota’s budget surplus for the 2022-23 biennium jumped $820 million, up from the $1.6 billion estimated at the end of…
Those of you with a heated school board election in your area better buckle up for the next two weeks because it’s going to be a wild ride. With help…
These were some of the headlines in local media in July, when CNBC released its annual “America’s Top States for Business” ranking: On closer investigation it turned out that these…
There is finally some good news on the inflation front: your home heating bill should be lower this year thanks to lower natural gas prices, according to a new forecast…
On October 18, the St. Paul City Council approved a major overhaul of the city’s zoning code, effectively ending single-family zoning in St. Paul. Specifically, zoning changes will consolidate the…
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s penchant for offering absurd plea bargains for violent offenders has been exposed several times in her first ten (10) months on the job. One…
Three defendants in the case ran a Burnsville charter school. In the last post, we dug into the tax returns filed by the biggest nonprofits involved in the free-food scandal.…
Back in 2020, my colleague Tom Steward and I described how Minnesotans — and residents of the Twin Cities specifically — were failed so miserably that summer by their state…
It has become the working policy of law enforcement to allow protestors to take over roadways or block access to buildings, etc. This passive approach has grown in popularity in…
The Golden Turkey committee tried to get through the nomination process this year without choosing a rail or bus project, but those plans were derailed (get it?) when the legislature…
As I have written before, the debate over school choice is often framed as an “either/or” argument — either you are for empowering parents or you are a supporter of…
A recent article in Utility Dive describes a growing problem at solar facilities reaching the middle of their useful 25-year lives: the inverters used to convert the current of electricity…
Somewhere along the way, local officials started buying into the concept that cities need to develop a so-called brand to drive growth and economic development. The city of Rochester has…
The major nonprofit players in the free-food scandal may be dead and gone as corporate beings, but they live on in tax return and audit trails. Examining the official IRS…
In December last year, I wrote about newly released Census Bureau data which showed that, on net, Minnesota lost more residents to other parts of the United States in 2021-2022…