Say Anything Blog

A friend of mine once said that the biggest problem with the media in North Dakota isn’t so much any sort of ideological bias (though he said that’s a problem too) but rather that all the media outlets in the state just seem to be pro-status quo.  With a few deviations now and then, probably just to make it look like they’re not utter hacks, North Dakota’s media pretty much just goes along with whatever the politicians want.

Which begets fawning editorials like this one from the Bismarck Tribune, which is little more than paragraph after paragraph of superficial praise.

Praise that is, largely, unwarranted.  The Tribune heaps praise on the Governor and the legislature for having a $1.2 billion budget surplus going into this legislative session.  I would point out that it was oil selling at $100/barrel and more that re-sparked the state’s oil industry and pushed massive tax revenue windfalls and not any sort of policy-making magic on the part of the legislators which created that surplus.  And having reached the bitter end of the legislative session, and with pretty much every penny of that massive surplus staying in government and very little of it coming back to the taxpayers in the form of much-needed (in these economic times) tax relief, our political leaders hardly deserve praise.

And there’s more reason to be less-than-satisfied with the state of affairs in North Dakota right now.

Oil production, which again has driven most of the economic boom in recent years, is down.  And with that projections on tax revenues are down as well some $200 million.  Personal income in the state is projected to fall 15.4%,  bankruptcies were up 17% in 2008 and as a cherry on top of this steaming pile of ugly economic news is word from weeks ago that rate of unemployment in the state grew 50%.

Things might be ok now, but with all this growth in spending (one legislator I’ve spoken to recently estimated that the session would end with a 30% increase in general fund spending) and government we’re playing a dangerous game.  Our political leaders are creating a lot of new government that we taxpayers must support with our money going forward.  And giving the slowing pace of the economy nationally, we may not have the tax revenues to do it.

Now is no time to be heaping praise upon our political leadership in North Dakota.