Where We Are At.  In today's Morning Take, Blois Olson described the current debate at the Capitol attempting to reach a budget/policy compromise as taking place in the Cone of Silence.  As a baby boomer, I immediately caught the cultural reference and can't agree more with Olson's apt illustration.  For those of you too young to remember Get Smart, here's the Cone of Silence.

Even with the close-to-the-vest nature of the negotiations, it's pretty obvious where the major points of contention lie.  The Governor laid out a very ambitious platform in January that called for an increase in the gas tax and an extension of the medical provider tax.  The House went further proposing greater investments in education and health and human services and suggesting these investments could be paid for with adjustments to the Minnesota tax code.  The Senate went a totally different direction, coming forward with smaller budget targets and a no-new-taxes approach.  It was always easy to imagine that the initial approaches by each of the branches would be what they were and anticipating that, the Legislature put forward deadlines that aimed to speed up the decision-making process and ensure a more organized, if not amicable, end to the session.  The overall and individual conference committee budget targets were to be set by May 6 and conference committee reports were to be finished by May 13 under that framework.

So much for good intentions.  It's May 16 and the overall budget situation remains unresolved.  At this point, it's difficult to see the session ending smoothly or on time, but given the power of technology to put together substantial bills in a short period of time, it's certainly not out of the question that business can conclude by the 11:59.999999........... on Monday, May 20.  I am not a betting man (I lost fifty cents to an Augsburg College classmate on the 1972 Purdue/Notre Dame football game and have relegated myself to $2 show bets on the favorite at Canterbury Downs ever since), so I'm not going to post any odds regarding how this turns out.  I can only say that no one wins in a special session; one side simply loses more.  Given the uneven electoral swings in Minnesota over the past decade, I'm not going to venture reading the tea leaves as to what any of this means for the 2020 election cycle.

In the meantime, how about some of this with a slow theme (and oh, so mellow)?

I hope to provide some answers in my next post.