Empathy

Now I understand how small government Republicans feel on April 15th. It feels like the government has acted as nothing better than a two-bit mugger, taking your money against your will for its own purposes and to hell with how you feel about it. Yeah, I understand that feeling now.

House-Senate conference committee approves new Twins stadium

A House-Senate conference committee this morning tentatively approved a new $522 million stadium for the Minnesota Twins, and Democrat and Republican leaders said the project likely had enough votes to pass on the House and Senate floor.

I'm proudly liberal. I understand the need to spend to build society's infrastructure and I'm perfectly happy to help the less fortunate get a hand up. This has nothing to do with that. This is simple robbery using the power of the government instead of physical intimidation. The only true beneficiaries of this largess will be the billionaire owner and his multi-millionaire players, with the rest of us paying for the privallege of giving them even more of our money.

Even worse, if this thing must be built, the legislature should have done the decent thing and gone with Steve Kelley's proposal which paid off the stadium debts in a much more reasonable time frame and also gave us some money for useful projects. Instead, we're stuck with the cowardly and dishonest House version which we'll be paying off until I'm sixty years old. Shame on all the legislators who voted for this boondoogle, and especially shame on Steve Sviggum who has been the biggest cheerleader of this theft. The next time Sviggum complains about taxes, I hope everyone remembers how free he was when it was somebody else's pocket being picked.