How to Govern Like the Taxpayers League

John Gunyou was Minnesota's Finance Minister under Republican Governor Arne Carlson and is now Minnetonka's City Manager. He takes a crack this morning at governing like the Taxpayer's League and their favorite Republican Governor, Tim Pawlenty, who promised to never raise our taxes, but said nothing about fees and local property taxes, which have skyrocketed:

Here's a civics question to start the day. Who provides your public services like police and fire protection, education, parks and roads? Is it: (a) cities, counties and schools, (b) Uncle Sam & Cousin Tim, or (c) the Minnesota Taxpayers League?

Listening to the Taxpayers League and their political sycophants crow about our state's drop in tax rankings is a little hard to take for those of us actually responsible for delivering the services those taxes pay for. It's a whole lot easier to pontificate about downsizing government when you don't have to figure out how to stretch shrinking resources to patch crumbling streets.

Still, a good bureaucrat should always be open to new ideas, no matter the source. Maybe we've been thinking about public services all wrong. Maybe it is possible to cut funding and improve services at the same time.

In the city I manage, speeding and road repair are our residents' two greatest concerns. Like most cities, more than two-thirds of the property taxes we collect are allocated to our police and street budgets.

We also fund our roads with a share of the gas tax, but the state hasn't raised that user fee for 18 years, so our allocation has been largely frozen. Asphalt obviously costs more than it used to, so we've had to double the property taxes devoted to our local streets in recent years.

We've been thinking that we need to invest even more resources in road maintenance and traffic control. Silly us. We should be tackling those problems like the Taxpayers League would.

So here's what I came up with: inverted speed bumps. Rather than patch potholes, we should embrace them as traffic control devices. That way, we could forgo the expense of road repair AND cut funding for public safety. And the true genius is, we'll save more and more money every year as our roads continue to deteriorate and motorists are forced to drive even slower!

Why, there's no limit to this kind of creative thinking. Here's another one: perpetual student teachers. Indentured servitude was good enough for our founding fathers, so why not use it from preschool through grad school?

Rather than pay all those exorbitant professional salaries that consume three-fourths of our school budgets, we could replace teachers with rolling interns -- seniors would teach the juniors what they learned last year, juniors would teach the sophomores, and so on. Since our test scores are already high, we can keep passing on all that good knowledge year after year, and never have to support another school referendum!

Or how about random drug dispensing? If we mixed in cheap placebos with the real pills, prescription drugs would be far more affordable, pharmacists wouldn't have to decide who they want to serve, and we'd cull the herd of costly sickos. OK, this one needs a little more work, but you get the concept.

With a little creative thought and courageous political leadership, it really is possible to get something for nothing. The Taxpayers League was right all along.

The sad part about this is that this wouldn't bother the Taxpayer's League at all. When you are rich you can avoid little headaches like poor roads, silly public schools, and a messed up healthcare system. If the rest of us can't fend for ourselves without the help of the government, then we are just getting what we deserve.