Minnesota Tax Handbooks

Minnesota Tax Handbook (2008 edition) is a handy reference for the profile of state and local taxes in Minnesota. This webpage on Minnesota Revenue Department has all recent editions of the handbook since 2000 -- if you like to trace the changes over time.  

The Short and Simple Story of Credit Crisis

I cannot help sharing you this video cartoon, which is probably worth more than 1,000 hours of instruction.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Accounting gimmicks won't fix the budget

Humphrey Institute Senior Fellow Jay Kiedrowski published his editorial in the Start Tribune (02/13): Accounting gimmicks won't fix the budget:

The state of Minnesota is facing a total budget deficit of $5 billion for the new biennium (from July 2009 through June 2011). In the new budget proposal released last Tuesday, Governor Pawlenty claims to have cut spending without increasing taxes to balanced the budget for the next two years. However, Kiedrowski points out that the budget proposal “fails to fix Minnesota’s long-term revenue and expenditure imbalance, has serious technical flaws, and has a questionable value premises.”

(The original unedited version is presented through PNLC’s pubTalk blog.)

Welcome to our new course weblog!

Hello friends,

Welcome to our new course weblog of "State and Local Public Finance," which is created as an additional channel of communication for our journey together on PA5113, 2009 Spring.  

Throughout the semester, each of you will be required to post two blogs, one on a selected revenue policy and the other on a selected expenditure policy. You shall discuss with your group members to coordinate the blogs so that each 5-person group will have one blog posted each week in the remaining 10 weeks. Please submit this group schedule to me before next Wednesday. 

The broad topic area for each week is following the lecture schedule (see the table below). You shall pick a specific point of interest, find related materials on the Internet, and present your comments or questions that are related to our lecture or readings. Each blog should provide hyperlinks to additional web-base resources, and I especially welcome multimedia ones as they are more enjoyable.

You are all encouraged to read these blogs and add comments. Some blogs may be briefly discussed in our class, with the authors invited to make "little speeches." Each week we will select a "Post of the Week," whose author will be awarded 1 extra point in participation score. On the other hand, you will be deducted 1 point if you fail to post the blog in a pre-determined week, or deducted 0.5 point if you post it late.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.