Local View: Mistakes are one thing, catastrophic failures another for Walz

Gov. Tim Walz is taking it on the chin these days for the short tenure of his pick for the head of the Office of Cannabis Management. It turned out that Erin DuPree, who would have been in charge of regulatory compliance for the state’s weed growers, appears to have illegally sold cannabis products at her hemp shop. She resigned one day after her appointment.

The governor definitely made an embarrassing and dumb mistake, but hiring mistakes happen in any large bureaucracy, whether in the public or private sector.

I don’t think Minnesotans really care that much about a public official’s occasional stumbles. They do care about persistent catastrophic failures, though, and Walz is delivering those in spades.

Let’s go through the list.

On the economy, Minnesota is falling behind, and Walz is to blame. The growth rate of our private sector is at the lowest point in decades, and the governor seems to have no answer for it other than increasing state spending by 38% in a single legislative session. Despite a $19 billion surplus — larger than the entire budgets of 17 U.S. states and even dozens of countries — Walz barely gave any of it back to Minnesotans and even went on to raise taxes by an additional $9 billion. In a poll of key Minnesota House districts released by my organization, the Minnesota Private Business Council, those new taxes are opposed by over 65% of voters.

Walz crows about our low unemployment rate, but that reality is driven by a lot of people retiring from the workforce, an exodus of many workers out of the state, and a lot of COVID-relief dollars still sloshing around the state. An unbiased look at the data shows that Minnesota’s long-term economy is at the most precarious moment in its history, substantially driven by the anti-jobs policies of the far left.

On crime, liberals in St. Paul for years told us COVID-19 was the cause of the most violent period in Minnesota’s history, but murders statewide in 2022, well after COVID dissipated, were still 75% higher than in 2019, before the pandemic. In Minneapolis, murders are nearly 50% higher than in 2019. And, also in Minneapolis, 23 cars are being stolen every day. Yet Walz responded to the continued crime epidemic by letting criminals out even earlier.

On basic government functions, Minnesota is living through the worst period of financial mismanagement and fraud in its history. We have a 14-mile track of light rail, the Southwest Light Rail, that is $1 billion over budget and a decade late. We had the Feeding Our Future fraud in which $250 million were given away to fraudsters despite numerous red flags.

Preceding Walz, there have been the other extraordinary failures of the Department of Human Services in which hundreds of millions of dollars were overpaid, uncollected, or otherwise lost to fraud. And Walz has responded with a few ad-hoc changes that amount to moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic.

On education, only half of Minnesota kids are proficient in reading and math, with steep drops beginning before the pandemic and continuing throughout Walz’s tenure. That statistic, and the consequences for our kids and our state, should haunt every public official. But no solutions are forthcoming from our governor who loves to remind everyone of his background as a teacher.

Why is Walz failing so dramatically? The policies he has adopted are so kooky (and the response to crises so slow) that one is tempted to attribute them to the influence of the products regulated by the aforementioned Office of Cannabis Management.

But no, the cause isn’t any substance. The cause is our governor’s willingness to turn over the governance of our state to extremists like Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Attorney General Keith Ellison. And so Minnesota is led down the path of tax hikes despite a $19 billion surplus, crushing burdens on small business, defunding police and kicking them out of our schools, and inaction in the face of historic challenges.

The problem with Walz isn’t occasional mistakes. The problem is his destructive, San Francisco-style policies that have had catastrophic consequences for Minnesota families, workers, and small businesses. Minnesota is a great state with a proud and worthy history, but it needs a governor who rejects far-left extremism and instead delivers the common-sense solutions Minnesotans need.

Walz has an opportunity to change course in the 2024 legislative session. Minnesotans should demand he does.

Jim Schultz