Say what you will about Jesse Ventura – and if you’re a teacher, a student, a state union member, a conservative, a liberal, a journalist, a politician, a Christian, a volunteer, a smoker, a rural resident, an abortion opponent or a parent of an autistic child, you probably have some nasty words for him – but there’s something you have to admire about somebody willing to do what he thinks is right regardless of the political consequences.

Saturday, February 02, 2002

Say what you will about Jesse Ventura – and if you’re a teacher, a student, a state union member, a conservative, a liberal, a journalist, a politician, a Christian, a volunteer, a smoker, a rural resident, an abortion opponent or a parent of an autistic child, you probably have some nasty words for him – but there’s something you have to admire about somebody willing to do what he thinks is right regardless of the political consequences.

If you’ve been following the state’s budget deficit, you know that Ventura proposed a solution that involved both spending cuts and either expanded or increased taxes. Typically when it comes to politicians and deficits, the two parties group themselves on one side or the other: Either they want to raise taxes or they want to cut spending. There are exceptions, and probably nobody exclusively picks one or the other, but usually it’s the conservative thing to do to cut spending and the liberal thing to do to raise taxes.

Well, Ventura proposed to do both – raising taxes on things like gasoline and tobacco, and expanding the sales tax to some services and things that are not now taxed, including (gasp!) newspapers and advertising sales.

His list of things to cut included an array of programs that many of us probably never heard of – until the threatened agencies started screaming about it. The state volunteer office is one; a program for autistic kids is another; even a state haircut inspector, who investigates grievances over hairdos, is on the chopping block.

After having already enraged huge swaths of voters in areas like K-12 education, higher education and labor in his first three years on the job, it seems like Ventura is now going after people who he hasn’t managed to anger yet.

What do you call this kind of strategy?

Well, whatever qualms you and I have with his proposals, I at least have to admit that what he’s doing is what he thinks is necessary – not what is necessary to get him good poll numbers, or what is necessary to get him reelected, but what he believes is necessary to balance the budget. This makes him a convenient target for politicians on all sides.

There are problems with what he has proposed – don’t get me wrong. The biggest is possibly his proposal to slash local government aid. He has presented this as a way to get rural cities to reduce their budget reserves, contributing that money to cleaning up the budget mess. That may be a fine idea, but the problem is that his cut in aid to cities and counties would be permanent. The cities would end up running their reserves dry, raising local taxes, or both.

Weaning rural governments off state aid is something that seems to fit well with Ventura’s philosophy: Take care of yourself, and don’t come crying to me when you need money. Local problems need local solutions, he says. That’s all well and good, but local governments have been relying on this state aid for large percentages of their budgets for many years. Cut it now and rural residents will be the ones punished, either by reductions in what their city and county governments can do for them, or by paying higher local taxes.

I consider it a credit to Ventura that he isn’t worried about politics; it’s exactly what he promised when he ran for governor and it’s exactly what we’ve got. While his ideas aren’t all gold – and nobody’s are – I can at least respect him for not selling out.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor.