“I have made clear I’m not going to increase taxes,” Governor-elect Amy Klobuchar said on the campaign trail, “and I would actually like to lower taxes.” American Experiment stands four-square behind her in this.
Klobuchar will need all the support she can get as she faces a DFL legislature that ran on commitments of new spending and taxes totaling $14 billion each year. In an interview with KSTP, DFL House Leader Zack Stephenson is already pushing for new taxes:
Stephenson does leave open the possibility of some corporate tax increases to pay for some programs dealing with mental health, specifically mentioning a tax on social media companies that the Minnesota Senate proposed last year. It ultimately didn’t pass.
“These are some of the largest companies that have ever existed on the face of the earth,” he says. “Some of the wealthiest companies that exist today. And they are causing harm in Minnesota. Social media, we know, causes increased depression, anxiety, other mental health problems.”
As I wrote in May, the “DFL’s new tax on social media use is still a bad idea.” The burden of this tax levied on social media companies would simply be passed on to Minnesotan consumers. In addition, the money it is expected to raise — just under $100 million annually under a previous iteration — is being spent on several hundreds of millions of dollars of different things; Rep. Stephenson seems to want to spend it on mental healthcare, while Gov. Walz, when he was pushing it, wanted to spend it on workforce development. Spending $100 million on $500 million of programs is how you end up with billions of dollars in budget deficits.
House and Senate Democrats will run into opposition to tax increases of any kind from the governor-elect of their own party, Amy Klobuchar.
During her campaign and again on election night and again the day after the election, Klobuchar expressed opposition to tax increases. “Spoiler alert, you’re not going to like everything I do,” Klobuchar said Wednesday. “I have been very, very firm on this. I am not going to raise taxes, and that is not going to change.”
Governor-elect Klobuchar will, we trust, be true to her campaign promises and hold the line on yet another affordability-busting raid on Minnesotan’s pockets. In that, she has our support.