Pawlenty's smack down smacked down

Posted at 12:10 PM on February 1, 2010 by Mike Mulcahy (4 Comments)
Filed under: Pawlenty travel, Tim Pawlenty

Gov. Tim Pawlenty today expanded on his oft-repeated "ponzi scheme" slam of the federal budget in an opinion piece for Politico.

"Sooner or later," the governor writes, "the federal government's scheme will come crashing down, and the loss will be mammoth."

Pawlenty calls for a balanced budget amendment and for giving the president the line-item veto. He also wants the Bush tax cuts made permanent and more free trade agreements.

The governor has been making a similar pitch as he travels the country raising money for his federal political action committee.

But today he's taking some heat for his stance on another blog.

Bruce Bartlett worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations but later wrote a blistering attack on President George W. Bush in the book Imposter. And it looks like that book was just a warm up for his slam against Pawlenty.

He calls the governor's article "grossly ill-informed," and then gives a detailed critique of the balanced budget amendment proposal.

Bartlett writes that "Pawlenty is not ready for prime time," and that Pawlenty's budget ideas are "too transparently phony even for" the tea party/Fox news crowd.

Comments (4)

Someone should remind Pawlenty that he is still the governor of Minnesota. I didn't vote for him so that he could travel the country and ignore our states' problems. If only everyone didn't have to show up for work and get paid to look for a better job.

Posted by JohnPres | February 1, 2010 2:09 PM

FYI : Bruce Bartlett has a new book - The new American economy : the failure of Reaganomics and a new way forward.

I find it odd that Cheney proclaimed that deficits don't matter and that Bush paid for all the wars via supplemental budgets ... Obama is now paying a higher price because he is including the wars in our current budgets.

Pawlenty takes great pride in his ablity to "balance the state budget" through the use of line-item veto except hasn't it also been more a factor of reducing budget surpluses, and extending out payments to other budget years ... plus the money from the Federal Government.

That said, Pawlenty does know a thing about Ponzi schemes ... he's got one in ethanol ... Minnesota taxpayers subsides the industry and to produce ethanol that he mandated be used.

Posted by Minnesota Central | February 2, 2010 7:36 AM

It is always amusing to hear Gov Pawlenty talk about 'fiscal responsibility', balanced budget amendments & line item vetoes. He has the two latter tools, yet has been an abysmal failure at delivering the former to MN. The budget deficit he leaves his successor will exceed the one he met upon his arrival. Seems to me that's a failing grade, by any reasonable measure.

Posted by bsimon | February 2, 2010 3:07 PM

Imagine that...I liberal slant in the comments on a MPR site. You left wing cooks are so predictable!

Posted by Mike | February 3, 2010 2:10 PM

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