Club for Growth picks up on the CATO post I linked to and is reacting to a Pawlenty reaction to the bullet points. It is a great read and also goes into conservative VPing. Must read!!! 

Schroeder also says that “Just a month ago, Pawlenty erased a $935 million state budget deficit, without raising taxes.” But the estimated $1 billion budget deficit was not erased so much as it was patched up with scraps of paper and Elmer’s glue. Total spending cuts amounted to a meager $136 million out of a $36 billion biennial budget (that’s about one-third of 1%). The rest of the deficit was filled with $500 million from the state’s budget reserve and $109 billion in what amounts to a tax increase on Minnesota businesses. This means that there were no major structural changes to Minnesota’s growing budget (the biennial budget grew by 10%) and the Legislature will have to deal with the same problems in the next session.

Finally, Schroeder doesn’t mention several other aspects of Pawlenty’s record that conservatives find troubling: His tax increase in 2004 in violation of his pledge not to raise taxes, his aggressive energy mandates, his participation in and support for a regional cap-and-trade program, his support for the bloated Farm Bill, and his expansion of government-run health care.

Does this sound familiar? It should, many of us conservative Republicans have been saying this sort of thing, albeit, not nearly as well or focussed, for some time now. But then again, I am in property management and do this in my free time. 

HT Polinaut. 

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