Running to represent the citizens of south Maplewood and Woodbury
Massive expansion of the budget and one-party rule led to the embarrassment of unprecedented fraud in Minnesota.
This chart is only representing the state general fund. Actual state spending is double this when counting money passed through from the federal government, bonds, and other sources.
The full general fund spend costs each taxpaying household $15,000 per year. In 2020, that cost to you was about $10,000 per year. It has gone up $5,000 since then. And that is every year going forward. In 20 years, that could be the difference between being able to retire or not. Or it may have influenced your choice to have a child. Or be able to take family vacations.
Overall inflation has been 25-29% since 2020. That in itself is staggering and partly caused by out-of-control federal government spending. But this state spending chart represents a 50% growth in the same time period.
Covid was a main driver of the increase an much of the spending was argued as necessary to get through that. Federal money propping up the state budget runs out this year. So we need to actually reduce the budget since using Covid as an excuse for extra spending is dead.
If we returned to the trend line of spending from before Covid, the budget should be at $26-28 billion/year.
If we factored in a 25% growth to match inflation, the 2025 spend would have been $29-30 billion/year. It is currently about $6 billion more than that. Lisa DeMuth’s proposed budget is only calling for a $1 billion cut. When you look at the chart above, a cut is completely reasonable due to the anomaly of the Covid years and the expiration of extra federal money coming into the state. I will vote to cut the state budget.
Every statewide candidate has their plan for fighting fraud in state government. But I know from working in IT at banks that no system is foolproof. No one spends more than banks at stopping fraud, and they still lose billions every year. A key factor in keeping employees alert and vigilant against fraud is the threat that they can be fired if they don’t stop it.
Instead of state employees being fired for committing or allowing fraud, investigative reports and congressional testimony exposed that internal whistleblowers faced retaliation for trying to expose it. State workers who flagged suspicious billing reported being subjected to internal HR investigations, surveillance, threats to their future employment, and reduced responsibility.
Fraud is still occurring in state programs. Democrats would simply have a harder time in cleaning this up because it occurred under their watch. Since no state commissioners were fired and there is no accountability coming from within government, it will be up to voters to remove them from office
