Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and GOP leaders announced this evening they have reached a deal to end the government shutdown.
Dayton shocked Minnesota Democrats earlier in the day by announcing he would accept the GOP's final offer, which was delivered hours before the shutdown began July 1. As a result of the agreement, 22,000 state workers who had been idled will soon return to their jobs.
The agreement includes deferring a $700 million payment to schools and borrowing money to plug a budget deficit. The state will then owe more than $2 billion to its schools.
In return for dropping his proposal to raise the tax rate of those Minnesotans who claim more than $1 million in income after deductions (about 7,700 people), Dayton received very little. The GOP agreed to drop social issues from its spending bills, and end its efforts to reduce government employment by 15 percent.
(The current tax rate of those richest 7,700 is about 2% less than the rest of us, by the way.)
Dayton did win agreement on a $500 million bonding package to fund building projects and create jobs around the state.
Republican leaders of the House and Senate said they had the votes to pass the bills.
It's very hard to find much silver lining in this one. It's obviously good news for state workers who had been without a job for two weeks. And the bonding bill will undoubtedly be welcome news for construction workers who have been idled during the economic slowdown. But there's nothing else for Democrats to cheer here.
Voters have proven to have a very short and limited memory, as the Republican wave of 2010 proves. It's unlikely this episode, ended by Dayton's capitulation, will provide any boost for Democrats in next year's elections.
Essentially, the agreement prolongs the stupidity of the Pawlenty years, when more and more of the tax burden was shifted from the state to counties, cities and schools. Even former Gov. Arne Carlson (a Republican who would be a centrist Democrat today) derided the deal as simply kicking the can down the road.
Unfortunately, there's little reason to believe Democrats will be in any better position to bargain at the end of that road.
Forty years ago, the nation applauded the "Minnesota miracle," a restructuring of financing for schools and local governments. Decades of robust growth and the steady ascension of the Minnesota school system followed. The "miracle" began to unravel with Pawlenty's election in 2002. Today's agreement is likely the final nail in its coffin.
Welcome back to the '60s, Minnesota. Another giant leap backward, courtesy of Republicans.
As I keep saying, this is what it must have been like at the dawn of the Dark Ages.