My friend & former DFL Rep. Robin Brown ended her My Point of View column Tuesday with a quote from Abe Lincoln: “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

I find it to be ironic. Her former DFL colleagues seem to ignore it.

The House GOP attempted to address a problem with MinnesotaCare, which will run out of money in a few years.  The DFL’s answer was to kick the can down the road.

The House GOP attempted to address the need to repair our roads and bridges without a regressive and unfair gas tax. The DFL’s answer again was to kick the can down the road.

The House GOP attempted to give middle-class Minnesotans a tax break since the state’s budget should only grow as fast as a family budget. The DFL responded with kicking the can down the road on tax relief. Anyone see a pattern?

The DFL always touts a college tuition freeze — which, hey, that’s nice for me — but it’s just a Band-Aid to the issue of high college tuition. Once again, they attempt to escape the responsibility of handling it.

On clean water, the majority of our farmers already practice conservation methods and invest in the future by doing so. Gov. Mark Dayton then calls them polluters and tries to regulate them even more with buffers. Is it a wise investment in the future to hurt our farmers?

Finally on education, Gov. Dayton claimed to be investing in the future with universal pre-K. Research shows (and the governor’s own early learning advisers concur) that universal pre-K is hugely expensive and would not be effective in closing the achievement gap. The strategy the House GOP chose in smartly targeting our tax dollars on high-risk children with pre-K scholarships is a proven and effective method. All the governor’s expensive universal program would have done was cost our public schools more money (taking away from K-12) and put our many local childcare providers out of business. Doesn’t sound like a good future investment to me. The only future it would’ve made is putting child care providers out of business.

My party isn’t 100 percent innocent either, but if we’re going to talk about responsibility for the future, let’s at least be honest about it.

 

Spencer Krier

Glenville