Say Anything Blog

Today’s editorial in the Fargo Forum takes some, frankly, rather mean-spirited pot shots at the newly-founded North Dakota Taxpayer’s Association:

North Dakotans can thank themselves for having had the good sense to reject a misguided income tax cut measure that was pushed by the now-defunct Americans for Prosperity, a group that was formed in the state by Duane Sand, the rejected Republican candidate for the U.S. House, and Ed Schafer, the former Republican governor and current U.S. secretary of agriculture. (Schafer ended his involvement when he was named to the USDA post; Sand got off the payroll when he got the nomination for the House run.)

The executive director for “prosperity” was Dustin Gawrylow. He quit shortly after the November election, when the association’s tax cut measure was thrashed by voters.

But like flotsam at low tide, the former executive of the misnamed “prosperity” group has washed up on North Dakota’s public policy beach as executive director of a new self-defined watchdog group – something called the North Dakota Taxpayers’ Association. Gawrylow is nothing if not persistent in glomming on to causes most North Dakotans find at best out of the mainstream, at worst downright goofy.

Gawrylow’s association affixes North Dakota to its title, as if to suggest it represents all North Dakota taxpayers. It surely does not.

I wonder where Zaleski gets the idea that the NDTA doesn’t represent North Dakotans?  The organization may not represent North Dakotans who happen to sit on the Fargo Forum editorial board and pen grumpy screeds to be handed down to the plebes from the ivory tower, but the group is most certainly North Dakotan.  The director, Dustin, is a born-and-raised North Dakotan.  The list of supporters and contributors consists mostly of North Dakotans.

Zaleski suggesting that the NDTA isn’t a North Dakota group is like me suggesting that the Fargo Forum isn’t a North Dakota newspaper because they cover stories and sell copy in Minnesota.

I know that with the Measure 2 tax cuts going down on the last budget, the big-government “Republican” John Hoeven winning re-election handily and Obama winning nationally the proponents of big government are all about telling fiscal conservatives that they can all go die in a fire, but that doesn’t mean that the cause of fiscal conservatism is dead.  North Dakotans didn’t reject tax relief when they voted down Measure 2.  They simply bought a lie they were sold (by the Forum editorial board, among others) about income tax relief meaning no property tax relief.

When North Dakotans ultimately get neither someone is going to have to answer, but for now Zaleski and his ilk get their victory laps.

The rest of the editorial consists of Zaleski getting exercised by the NDTA’s daring to suggest that maybe something’s wrong when a 39% budget increase for higher   education isn’t enough.  Especially when North Dakota is already 2nd in the nation in per-capita spending on higher education, and some of our tuition rates run as high as 20% more than the average tuition in the rest of the country.

Perhaps, instead of attacking the directors of political advocacy groups, we could actually discuss those problems?  Is that asking too much?

I know that in Jack Zaleski’s perfect would we rank-and-file citizens would just shut up and trust what our betters tell us.  Thankfully, this isn’t Jack Zaleski’s world.  This is America, and in America we have a right to our free speech.  And a right to petition the government with our grievances.

And there’s not a damn thing “goofy” about that.