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July 22, 2005

“The state budget: Winners and losers”

MPR

As you are all aware of there was a temporary shut down of the Minnesota State government for eight days. Now that law makers have passed the new two year budget plan you may be wondering about what happened. This is exactly what an article entitled, “The state budget: Winners and losers,” published on July 14th 2005. Some of the big winners in the new budget are the works that started back to work after the shutdown but they are not the only ones. One winner is K-12 schools and early childhood education over the next two years they will get $12.6 billion. If you smoke you are most likely upset because law makers passed a 75 cent tax (oops I meant user fee) for cigarettes. MinnesotaCare, who take care of the mentally ill, will not see a cut of 27,000 employees as the governor wanted. Another winner is people that work in long-term care facilities because they will see a $1 per hour increase in their wages. Some money was allocated for short-term road care but Minnesota is still short nearly $1 billion needed to address transportation needs. Pawlenty says that a special session will be called to address the Twins and University of Minnesota’s new stadiums.

This article covers just some of what was all passed and failed to pass in the new budget plan. I liked this article because it served as a follow up to some of the earlier articles. If you have any opinions on the decisions made feel free to make a post.