Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

My Point of View by Robert Hoffman

We all have a lot on our plate at this time of year. Christmas shopping season is now in full swing, but so is tax levy season. This can’t keep up. Our plates may feel full with everything going on, but our pockets feel empty for the same reason.

Here are a few local examples. The school board had a proposed preliminary tax levy increase of 6.67% and chose to approve an increase of 6.42%. This is an 11% increase in two years from the school district. The city has a preliminary tax increase of 5.5%, but is working to whittle this number down. The county seems to have taxpayer concerns most at heart with a preliminary increase of 4.5%, and are also making efforts to bring this number down further.

The tax burdens placed on us by elected officials seems easy to just brush off and say, “it doesn’t really affect me that much, it’ll happen every single year, or there’s nothing I can do about it.” Earlier this year I testified to both the city and county about how recent increases have affected rentals here in town that I own or manage. For example, if I pass costs along to tenants, property tax increases from just 2022 to 2023 alone equaled $18 to $35 per tenant, per month — just for the tax increases alone. There have also been obvious increases in gas, electricity, labor and products as well, all affected by skyrocketing inflation. Did voting for a Democrat raise your rent? It’s something to think about this Christmas shopping season.

Maybe it’s all tax money being well spent. Minnesota had a tax surplus of billions and Gov. Walz mailed out his couple of hundred-dollar Walz Checks (that weren’t even printed in Minnesota) and what happened next? Never mind, the DFL “trifecta” raised taxes again.

The U.S. has spent $76.8 billion in aid so far to Ukraine, Minnesota is spending $729 million to renovate the state office building in St Paul (that’s over $5 million per legislator) and now, locally, the cost to upgrade our waste treatment plant has jumped from $30 million to $80 million because of new regulation and inflation. Though each have aspects that are arguably necessary in some ways, it is a lot of money spent on “…waste.”

What do we do then? We look for help. We re-elect those who fight for the taxpayer, like Reps. Peggy Bennett and Patty Mueller, Sen. Gene Dornink and Congressman Brad Finstad. We vote out those who are so out-of-touch that much of what I just outlined seems to be OK to them, and we recruit more people to run who actually try to look out for the public.

There is a story I often use to illustrate the power of finding a friend and how much it can offer help to a situation:

A guy is walking down the street, and he falls into a hole. The hole is so deep that he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, “Hey, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by, “Hey, Joe, it’s me. Can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. The guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

Let’s find our Joes out there to jump in the hole with us and help get us out of this mess. We have a lot on our plates, a Christmas season ahead to shop for and the 2024 elections to find some great local candidates for.

Robert Hoffman is chairman of the Freeborn County Republican Party.