[This commentary originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Friday, April 4, 2008. As the state Senate bonding bill is debated, it’s important to remember that the first criterion of any project is whether or not it contributes to an essential function of government. It’s also interesting to note that “no” is never a final answer to a legislator. The Rochester Volleyball Center, which appears in the recently passed Senate bonding proposal, was also on the table last year. Essential? You be the judge.]

Back in the days when grammar, not global warming, was taught in public schools, we learned that some adjectives can’t be modified. “Unique,” for example. Either something’s unique — that is, one of a kind — or it isn’t. 

“Essential” is another. Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, the chief House sponsor of the bonding bill, must have missed class the day they taught grammar; she most certainly missed the day they taught economics. Everything you need to know about bad bonding policy, you can learn from Alice Hausman.

On Wednesday the Minnesota House and Senate passed a capital investment “bonding” bill that authorizes the state to borrow $925 million to finance public works projects. Gov. Tim Pawlenty threatens a veto, saying $925 million is too much; it surpasses the state guideline for debt service of 3 percent of state revenue.

But, Hausman told the Star Tribune, the bill spreads out the bond sales without violating the 3 percent guideline. Thus, lawmakers can throw more money down the rabbit hole leading to Alice’s wonderland of grammatical and economic nonsense. Let’s start with the grammar.

In Alice’s wonderland, words mean whatever legislators need them to mean. Hausman defends the size of the bonding bill, saying legislative negotiators pared nearly $4 billion in requests to less than $1 billion in “most essential” projects. Not to pick nits here, but dictionaries define “essential” as “absolutely necessary; vitally necessary; indispensible.”

If a project request is “essential” to the state, then there are dire consequences to the state if it’s not funded; if it’s not essential, state government shouldn’t be funding it. “Most essential” is as nonsensical a concept as ever uttered by a mad hatter.

Consider the “most essential,” $3 million expansion of the National Volleyball Center in Rochester: absolutely necessary, vitally necessary, indispensible or no? Dire consequences for Minnesotans? Or no?

Responsible legislators might say “no,” but in Alice’s wonderland when some dodo makes a suggestion, everyone races around in a circle and everybody wins — and Alice doles out the comfits.

In Alice’s wonderland, everyone eats from the side of the mushroom that makes spending grow. Grinning like Cheshire cats, they ponder “how much the state CAN spend” rather than “how much the state SHOULD spend.”

Back in March, before the House and Senate agreed on $925 million as the “right” number for the bonding bill, Hausman hesitated to call a conference committee, which would determine the projects and funding that would make it into the final bill. Her rationale was: “Without agreement on the size of the bill, it is hard to write the first line.” Nonsense.

Hausman is absolutely wrong; the first line of the bonding bill is easy to write. It is an appropriation for an “essential” capital expenditure, which means the capital investment relates to a constitutional responsibility of state government that should not be delayed for another year. The second line meets the same criteria. So does the third. The last item in the bonding bill is the line above the first constitutionally legitimate expenditure that isn’t absolutely necessary.

If the bonding bill at that point is a mere $600 million, then that’s the appropriate and legitimate level of state bonding. If indeed everything on the list is both a constitutional responsibility of the state and essential to the state and the total is $1.25 billion, well, then legislators do have to look for other sources of revenue – first eliminating non-essential expenditures elsewhere in the budget.

In fairness, we should note that Hausman’s approach to bonding is not unique. Although the governor says at $925 million the bonding bill is “too much,” he is still on the same side of the looking glass as Hausman. He, too, starts with a bonding bill cap instead defining which projects are essential and which are not. Nibbling on the other side of the mushroom to shrink the bonding bill to a mere $825 million is less damaging to taxpayers, but no less a mocking of fiscal responsibility.

In Alice’s wonderland, the bonding bill is a croquet game without rules where taxpayers take the roles of flamingoes (mallets) and hedgehogs (balls) and get knocked around and rolled through hoops at the whim of legislators. Sadly for taxpayers, the bonding bill is not a fantastical dream; it’s simply fantastical. How the state can refuse to bond for essential roads and bridges while at the same time eagerly passing on to our children the debt on local hockey arenas and polar bear exhibits is beyond my per diem level.

Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall.

Craig Westover is a contributing columnist to the Pioneer Press Opinion page and a senior policy fellow at the Minnesota Free Market Institute (www.mnfmi.org). His e-mail address is westover4@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Conservatives lose economic arguments, not because they are wrong, but because gorillas are cute.

On the Opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press today (“Minnesota Senate’s bonding bill a responsible action”) state Sen. Keith Langseth, DFL-Glyndon, grabs the guidon of government on the march and hails the Senate’s $329 million public works bill as “the most responsible thing the Legislature could do to help the state climb out of the recession.” More than half the projects in the bill, he writes, are “asset-preservation projects” that are “ready to go,” “will employ local construction workers all over the state,” and “will immediately create jobs.”

Blarney, said Jonathan Blake, vice president of Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, in a Pioneer Press op-ed (“Minnesota Senate bonding bill is irresponsible”) last week, “How many jobs will these projects actually create?” Blake points out that Langseth’s own estimates range from 5,000 to 3,500 new jobs while some media reports suggest 15,000 jobs will be created. Last year DFL Senator Steve Murphy promised that tax increases in the massive transportation bill, passed over the governor’s veto,would create 33,000 jobs “in the very first year.” Murphy now admits his estimate (a polite euphemism for bullsh*t – he didn’t even try to get it right) was off by 100 percent. Blake concludes the job numbers were being “pulled out of thin air.”

And, asks Blake, “How exactly does a gorilla exhibit stimulate the economy? Are bike trails really the most efficient way to put people to work? Why should all state taxpayers fund a new runway in Bigfork?”

And with knockout punches on job estimates and project value, Blake clearly wins the debate, and conservatives lose the issue.

Here’s why. Once the threshold economic principle is breached and liberals get conservatives arguing about the details of tax and spending plans, how cute gorillas are, liberals win. Remember, the public thinks gorillas are cute, and if the perception is that somebody else is picking up the tab, they want to go look at gorillas. They like their bike paths, and they don’t have any (or so it seems) out-of-pocket expense for them. Airports seem important, why shouldn’t government pay. We need roads and bridges; who’s going to build and maintain them if not the government?

If conservatives hope to make any progress at all winning the hearts and minds of the public, they have to keep the context of the debate on the threshold principle, the “big lie,” if you will. In this case the “big lie” is Langseth’s claim that government spending, in and of itself, creates jobs and “will help the state climb out of the recession.”

Government spending doesn’t create jobs. We’ve been down this road before. In fact, non-essential government spending is a swift kick to the privates (pun intended) that is doubly painful. Government can’t spend a dollar building roads, bike trails or anything else of benefit to chest-beating primates until it takes the dollar from a productive taxpayer, i.e. someone who has with his or her labor earned a dollar by creating a dollar’s worth of value for someone else. The dollar spent by the government is an unearned dollar not spent by the person who earned it. The dollar used by the state to “create a job” is a dollar not available to the person who earned it to create a job, support an existing job or invest so as to allow someone else to create a job.

The double whammy occurs when government spends the dollar on a non-essential project. The reason St. Paul’s gorillas need subsidized housing, and Rochester needs a subsidized home for international volleyball events, is that no private individual would invest in those enterprises. In other words, there is a more efficient use of capital creating a higher return for the investor because people want or need something more than they want to go look at gorillas or watch the French actually compete at something. When government subsidizes something because the market will not support it, government is diverting capital from its most efficient use to a lesser use and the community as a whole loses, which is hardly a line to pull us out of a recession.

Government can’t create jobs, it can only change the mix of employment, and when it does so through non-essential projects undertaken simply because they are “ready to go,” it harms not helps the economy, is the threshold principle that conservatives must defend. Why argue with liberals about how wrong their job creation numbers are when the right job-creation number is zero? Why argue about whether gorillas have educational value (might be nice if the kids studied economics) or if volleyball centers draw international events to Rochester when the key to pulling out of a depression is getting dollars flowing to their most productive use? To where we get more for less, not less for more.

If creating jobs were as easy as passing a bonding bill out of the state Senate, why did Langseth and his cronies stop at $329 million? Why not double that number and create twice as many jobs? Triple it even. Seems the “most responsible thing the Legislature could do” is pass an even larger bonding bill. And then, just to create even more jobs, legislators could go on a window-breaking rampage. Just think how many glaziers we would need to employ!

Update: See “Rep. Matt Dean on Bonding for State Buildings“