OUR OPINION: Pay more, but only if services cost less

Dust billows behind the car as the tires spin and vehicle picks up speed. In the front seat are Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Democratic leaders of the Minnesota House and Senate; and while one passenger has stomped down on the gas, no one's got a grip on the wheel.

It's a political game of chicken, and it'll play out over the next two weeks. But someone better grab that wheel and steer because the car is marked State of Minnesota and it's headed for a cliff.

Here's a face-saving way for the participants to steer out of danger and slow down. It's a compromise that not only would let each side get something that it wants, but also would put Minnesota on a more sustainable fiscal path for good.

This compromise has been suggested before and has been available for months. But time now is short, the stakes are getting higher and the need to deal is more urgent than ever.

The deal is this:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty agrees to raise taxes. That, of course, has been the stumbling block for years.

So, in order for the governor and likely presidential candidate to justify changing his mind, Pawlenty should insist on this:

The Legislature must cut the state's budget -- but it must do more than cut. It must reform the state's collective bargaining rules and other labor practices so that the cuts are sustainable over time, the tax hikes don't simply get eaten up in the next round of pay hikes and the state gets its long-term pension costs under control.

That's the key to making sure Minnesota doesn't follow California, New Jersey, Illinois and other states on the road to financial ruin. If the state wants to avoid that outcome, then the time to "bend the cost curve" is now.

If Pawlenty could win tough and fiscally conservative reforms, then he easily could justify a tax hike. Because while taxpayers quickly would adjust to the higher taxes, the reforms would keep impacting and streamlining state government for years to come.

Frankly, that's the kind of renewed efficiency Minnesotans want to see -- and the fact that they haven't seen it may explain the strength of "no new taxes" Republicans, including Pawlenty, in recent years.

n Exhibit A: Last week's SurveyUSA/KSTP-TV poll, which showed Tom Emmer -- the conservative Republican who is the GOP's nominee for governor -- with a solid lead over his Democratic challengers.

The poll "is good news for Repub endorsee Tom Emmer and bad news for the DFL, irrespective of which of their remaining candidates gets the nomination," wrote Erick Black of MinnPost.com.

The results "show Emmer with fairly consistent strength across age, gender and income lines."

n Exhibit B: Why have so few school bonding proposals passed in Minnesota in recent years? Possibly because a majority of voters don't think they're getting or would be getting enough value for their dollar.

Change that perception, and the hostility so many people feel toward government would be eased, too.

In any event, those are the basic arguments Pawlenty could make.

He'd better hurry.

"State faces unprecedented cash-flow crisis," read a headline last week on the Web site of the normally staid Minnesota Public Radio.

And that was just one of the sobering descriptions of the budget crunch.

"This is as serious as a heart attack," Minority Leader Kurt Zellers of Maple Grove told MPR.

"We are in a dire economic strait."

Among other crises, the state is running dangerously short of cash, said Brian McClung, the governor's spokesman, to the website Politics in Minnesota.

"He (McClung) noted that if the courts seek to reinstate the governor's unallotments, it would immediately bankrupt the state," the website noted.

That doesn't sound like the Minnesota most residents thought they knew. But in order to recover that economic and social strength, two things must happen: Residents must pay more, and state government must cost less.

That's the compromise lawmakers could and should reach.