Daniels Calls Walz Checks a Re-election Ploy

Brian Daniels (24B) State Representative from Faribault talked about priorities he hopes will happen in the Minnesota Legislative Session which begins Monday.

He was a guest on the KDHL AM Minnesota program. The Republican state legislator joined us by telephone from his Faribault home office.

I checked the US Census 2020 population for Minnesota. A total of 5,706,494 people. Then subtracted the number of people under the age of 18 to come up with some round numbers to use.

If the state wanted to return the entire 7.7 billion dollar state surplus to it's residents 18 and older they could send $1,750 checks to each of them.

Daniels responded, "I would rather do it in more of a permanent fashion. Not just a one-time check. I think that's what people want. I mean we're in the top 5 taxed categories in every tax there is. I would rather start working on that and get us out of the top 5 rather than send a check back."

"We had stimulus checks not too long ago. That was $1,400 dollars per person. I don't think it's enough to really make a long-term difference." Daniels added saying, "But this study from the IRS (he cited earlier) went back to 2007 and people have been leaving Minnesota because of the high taxes for a number of years."

"I think we need to look at long term solutions not a lot of short-term solutions."

The Faribault State Representative was first elected in 2014.

He called the "Walz Checks" suggested by Governor Tim Walz, "More of a re-election ploy then it is anything else. It just doesn't look good. I guess what I'd like to do is get together with all the financial people and find out where we really need to spend the money. Get that done first."

Walz suggested sending $350 dollar checks to Minnesotans to help recover from the pandemic.

Daniels is also not agreeable to the Governor's proposed 2 billion dollar plus bonding proposal saying, "Every year we pay about $750 million dollars of interest on the General Obligation Bonds. That's 1.5 billion dollars every biennium just to pay the interest on the G.O. Bonds we have right now."

"Just think of we could do with that kind of money if we weren't paying interest on it. I look at as a credit card. Yea the interest on it is very low but on the other hand if we did cash we'd be able to spend more on those projects. So I'd like to see it (bonding bill) quite a bit smaller."

Daniels did point out he and State Senator John Jasinski of Faribault are carrying a bill this session to assist the city of Morristown. "To upgrade their water and sewer infrastructure. We have a bonding request in there as well but since the last time I spoke with Senator Jasinski there was about six billion in bonding requests came in."

He added, "There's need out there but I'd like to stick with the basics. Safe water, good

streets and there's a lot of extra stuff in the Governor's proposal."

You can listen to a podcast of the show on your time here.

What do you think the state should do?