It's Walsh, and the lawyers at Powerline, Minnesotans all, have long known him and long despised him
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Posted on July 26, 2024 by John Hinderaker in 2024 Election, Minnesota, Tim Walz
Tim Walz for Veep? Take Him, Please!
I am not sure why Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has wound up on some observers’ short lists as a candidate for vice president. He doesn’t seem to bring any obvious advantages to the Democrats’ ticket. But just in case, my colleagues John Phelan, an economist, and Bill Walsh, our Communications Director, had an op-ed in yesterday’s Star-Tribune: What America Needs to Know About Tim Walz of Minnesota.
During his first term as governor, Walz faced two major challenges: The riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and COVID-19. He fumbled both.
As the Twin Cities burned for three days in May 2020, Walz froze, terrified of upsetting his party’s activist base which sympathized with the rioters, for whom Kamala Harris raised money. Walz hesitated to commit the National Guard – whom he dismissed as “19-year-old cooks” – but when they finally were deployed, the violence ceased immediately.
This concern for criminals over law abiding citizens has contributed to Minnesota becoming a high-crime state for the first time in recent history, with part one crimes, such as murder, aggravated assault, and rape, now above the national average. Indeed, Minnesota’s crime rates began climbing in 2018, when Walz took office and two years before George Floyd’s death. In 2024, violent crime in Minneapolis remains 29% above 2019.
Walz’s administration has caused Minnesota to become, for the first time in our history, a high-crime state:
While Minnesota’s uptick in crime began before the George Floyd incident, Walz’s incompetence during the rioting that followed certainly made things worse:
In response to the second challenge, COVID-19, in defiance of the science, Walz shut down schools, churches and businesses and instituted draconian mask mandates and shelter in place orders. This was driven by a computer model cooked up by a couple of graduate students over a weekend and which was such a failure it was quietly abandoned. Walz spent $7 million on a morgue to hold all the forecast bodies. This, too, was quietly sold without ever housing a single body. Walz’s failed nursing home policies resulted in over 5,000 deaths from COVID, one of the highest percentages in the country. And the man who likes to talk tough on cable news, telling Republicans to “mind your own damn business,” created a phone line for people to snitch on their neighbors who violated COVID regulations.
For all this government activity in response to COVID-19, Walz still managed to oversee the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country, with $250 million stolen. Millions more have been wasted in other fraud schemes throughout his time in office, but no one has been fired or held accountable.
Walz’s tax and spend policies have hurt Minnesota’s economy. For the first time ever, Minnesota’s per capita GDP is now below the national average:
Walz has overseen a massive explosion in spending on K-12 education, while the actual achievement of Minnesota students has declined sharply. This is because under the current far-left regime, schools are training kids to be left-wing activists rather then teaching them to read and write:
More money, worse results. It is a classic liberal failure–or it would be, if you assume these people actually care about education as opposed to lining their own pockets. At the same time that our schools are failing, the Minnesota Department of Education oversaw the biggest single covid fraud in the country, somewhere between $250 million and $500 million in the Feeding Our Future scandal.
The acid test for any state is whether people are moving in or moving out. Minnesota, like California, New York and Illinois, is a state that people are fleeing. The only income range in which Minnesota attracts residents from other states, on a net basis, is 0 to $25,000:
