Exactly. What you get for higher taxes matters. What is interesting though is Minnesota’s tax are quite a bit higher than ours. And the revenue higher taxes produce allows Minnesota to make more of the public investments that matter to economic growth/prosperity. We are doing a case study of Minnesota’s tax and spending policies. I think folks will be surprised at how much higher their income, business, sales and gas taxes are than ours.

Thanks for the kind words. That is the debate. Do high taxes drive more and better jobs or as we see it talent which requires public investments both in education and creating places where mobile talent wants to live and work? Minnesota has been the high tax state (along with Illinois) in the Great Lakes for decades and has outperformed us and all the other lower tax Great Lakes States on all the economic measures that matter to people (jobs and income). We believe even with their latest tax increase that will be true in the future just as it has been in the past. There is more exploration coming from us on why Minnesota has been doing so much better than Michigan. Look forward to your reaction to that work as well.

I feel like I am responding to a lot of public conversation on the other side. Seems like they have no difficulty in getting their ideas out. But I would enjoy comments to the blog that don’t agree with my analysis so we can have a conversation here.