Editorial: Pawlenty fiscal ploy is a nonstarter

Minnesotans should be wary by now of constitutional strictures on state budgeting. They need only look to the fiscal horror show in California, or to the damage done to the University of Colorado by a state constitutional spending limit, to question the wisdom of restricting a legislature's taxing and spending authority in that inflexible way.

Closer to home and more recently, this state has seen how the constitutional dedication of tax revenues to special causes can produce perverse results when money gets tight. The 2009 Legislature was obliged by the 2008 Legacy Amendment to increase state spending on nature trails and arts programs, while every other activity financed with state tax dollars took a painful hit.

The lesson of those experiences is clear: Using the state's sophisticated economic modeling, elected legislators should have the freedom, as well as the duty, to rebalance revenues and spending each biennium in the face of changing state needs.

That lesson has evidently been lost on Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Last week, he proposed an amendment that flies in the face of good representative governance. It would limit biennial spending for ongoing programs to the total undedicated state tax receipts of the previous biennium. To the extent a biennium's receipts exceed the previous one, that increment could be spent only on one-time efforts, reserve funds or politically irresistible tax rebates.

It was duly noted by the Republican governor's DFL opponents that not once in seven years in office has Pawlenty proposed spending that would have satisfied the strictures his amendment would impose.

Further, the governor did not describe what would happen to people and institutions that rely on state spending if his amendment were adopted. The impact would be harsh. Minnesota is projected to collect $31 billion in 2010-11 and $34 billion in 2012-13. Existing state programs are forecast to require more than $38 billion to operate in 2012-13.

Pawlenty's amendment would widen the gap between available revenue and existing programs to more than $7 billion in 2012-13. A similar gap would recur, biennium after biennium, as population growth increases the number of students to be educated, indigent elderly to be cared for and disabled people to be assisted. Legislators would be perpetually struggling to pay for this biennium's costs with last biennium's receipts.

The governor acknowledged as he presented this idea that it likely would win little support in the DFL-controlled Legislature, which solely has the power to put the amendment on the 2010 ballot.

But it's likely that the Legislature was not Pawlenty's intended audience. Rather, the amendment appears designed to curry the favor of national GOP kingmakers. It need not go to the voters to burnish Pawlenty's national reputation as a fiscal hawk, or to deflect attention from the yawning deficit he's leaving the state. The proposal allows him to claim that he had a plan to erase the deficit by squeezing spending, while doing none of the political heavy lifting required to actually balance a budget.

During the same hour in which Pawlenty unveiled his proposal, one of the DFL candidates for governor, Sen. Tom Bakk, was meeting with reporters to ask for early action on the expected 2010 bonding bill. Pawlenty's announcement detracted attention from that idea, which deserves serious consideration. The Legislature is set to return to the Capitol on Feb. 4. If a bonding bill were ready to enact then, it could work its job-creating magic for the full 2010 summer construction season. Wait until May, as usual, and the building projects bill won't have much impact until 2011.

Rather than launching politically propelled trial balloons that the Legislature is bound to -- and ought to -- shoot down, Pawlenty would do well to start working with legislators to get a bonding bill into shape for early action next year.