Reply #82: I am 100 percent in favor of spending more [View All]

[eyepaddle]

on MN Care, housing, transit and education.

However, it's not like this tax was approved, and now we just need to figure out where we are gonna spend it--stadium or schools?

Nope, it's the stadium or nothing. All the people railing against the stadium sound like as soom as we kill this thing once and for all greed will be eternally vanquished and we will have shangri-la on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. In the last decade of shutting down the stadium how much progress have we made in addressing those other needs?

All you accomplish by stopping the stadium is getting rid of baseball in Minnesota, maybe not tommorrow but soon enough. Carl Pohlad may be a flinty-hearted bastard but he alone isn't what got us into this position. The mentality that says "if I don't see a direct benefit MYSELF from these taxes, they must be wasted" is what has led to stagnation. Repeating it over and over and over is only helping drive the point home to the increasingly self-centered residents of this state.

I don't think building a stadium will suddenly awake a universal communitarian ethic or anything, I just know what will happen if we don't. Everything will just as bad as it is now--but we won't have baseball. We need to start somewhere in sending the message that if we all work together we can make things better than we can alone.

Once more, just to be clear if you wanted to bump income taxes (I personally hate the sales tax, but that's a separate topic) up to increase funding for more concrete priorities I'd jump on that ina second. But that issue isn't on the table right now--baseball is.