In recent weeks leading up to Tuesday's release of his proposed budget, Governor Tim Pawlenty alluded to conversations in Minnesota kitchens, where families are making difficult choices about how to manage tight budgets and plan for the future. Families are anxious, to be sure. Job losses are real – we've lost over 55,000 nonfarm jobs in Minnesota in the last year. The value of retirement accounts, homes, and other assets has fallen for most of us.

The challenge for Governor Pawlenty and the Legislature now is to reflect the reality of his kitchen-table analogy with policy decisions that serve Minnesota's people and plan for the future. This will require reworking significant pieces of the Governor's proposed budget, which take an approach to the state's finances that few families would pursue. Here are two observations about doing so.

A pro-business climate is one where few of us remain uninsured
Planning for the future means retaining eligibility for people using MinnesotaCare, recognizing that preventive, routine care now precludes costly emergency and chronic care later. What's more, hospitals are bound by ethics and federal law to provide emergency care for uninsured families, and the resulting costs are shifted onto payers of commercial insurance and taxpayers. Resulting high commercial health insurance premiums are toxic to small-business job creation. As a small business owner, I know that first hand. I am hopeful that Governor Pawlenty's past interest in boosting health care coverage and the Healthy Connections initiative he announced in 2007 will stimulate a better solution to managing state health care costs than adding 84,000 Minnesotans to the costly uninsured category. The calculus at the kitchen table will not be solved with such a measure, and Minnesota's people and business climate will suffer.

Higher tuition and property taxes don't produce jobs or position us for the future
Education and property taxes have long been the principal issues debated in state and local elections. Families with students attending the University of Minnesota or institutions in the MnSCU system recognize that reducing appropriations by $322 million for the systems will result in tuition increases – because Minnesotans know that education isn't free. Still, making it as affordable as possible requires more than attempts to cap tuition hikes by law – it requires a financial and political commitment to access to higher education. Our state's competitive advantage has always relied on skilled and entrepreneurial labor; developing this key asset is the core business of these institutions.

We've also seen in recent years that state budgets have been balanced in ways that push the responsibility for funding local services such as K12 education, public safety, and roads and bridges increasingly onto local units of government, who by state law rely on property tax for resources. Minnesotans – business owners and employees, young people, parents and retired households – depend on these public assets daily. Cutting $235 million of state revenue shared with more than 750 cities will shift more burden to property tax. Each of these measures threatens kitchen-table planning and leaves families with less ability to weather the recession, not more.