DEAD LAST: Walz Received 'F' On Fiscal, Tax Policy, Worst of All

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Kamala Harris has made a lot of mistakes in her great cluster-foul-up of a presidential campaign, and one of the worst mistakes she has made was selecting Tim Walz, who went “pheasant hunting” in a too-obviously brand-new vest and cap and with a shotgun he didn’t know how to load. The guy is a joke for any number of reasons, and on Tuesday we can add one more to the dogpile: The libertarian Cato Institute has released its annual scoring of state governors on spending and tax policy.

Guess who came in dead last?

Walz, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate this election, has led the North Star state since 2019. The Cato Institute is a libertarian group that generally prefers less government intervention in the private sector, lighter regulatory burdens, and lower taxes. Its fiscal report card released Tuesday looked at the policies of all 50 governors from 2022 to now in order to come up with its rankings.

In this iteration of the report card, Walz received a score of 19 out of 100 (the lowest in the country) and a corresponding “F” grade from the Cato Institute. The next-lowest was Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), who received a score of 29.

“He has overseen substantial spending increases and pushed many tax hikes,” the report said. “Minnesota’s general fund budget increased from $51.9 billion in the 2022–2023 biennium to $70.5 billion in the 2024–2025 biennium, a 36 percent increase.”

So, that’s why Kamala Harris chose the esteemed shotgun master from Minnesota. He’s already on board with her ideal for government spending, as in, more is good, too much is better, and bankruptcy is inevitable. But Cato had more information than that:

For instance, the institute cited one piece of legislation that raised taxes and fees on vehicles and transportation, including indexing the gas tax for inflation and raising vehicle registration taxes. Walz also greenlit raising taxes on wages to pay for a new mandatory paid family leave program.

Meanwhile, six governors, all Republicans, earned “A” ratings from the Cato Institute. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) clocked in at No. 1 with a score of 81, followed by Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE), Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV), Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR), Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), and Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-MT).

Iowa number one!

Granted, there are issues with fiscal and tax policy all around.

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The worst, of course, is the national debt. That’s the elephant in the room. As of this writing the debt stands at almost $36 trillion, and that’s almost certainly past the point of no return. There’s just no easy way out of this mess; someone, some president, would have to come into office with not a scalpel but a meat axe. If we eliminated every federal agency not specifically authorized by the Constitution, in effect taking the scope of the federal government back to, say, 1800, then at least we would have stopped the bleeding.

Nobody’s talking about that, of course. On tax policy, the difference is there; Trump’s stated tax plans are leaps and bounds ahead of the Democrat’s stated plans. But on spending? We’re faced with a choice between bad and worse; nobody in Washington or angling for a place in The Swamp is talking about cutting spending.

But one way or another, it’s going to have to happen. Better by design than by catastrophe – and make no mistake about it, a Harris/Walz administration would all but guarantee a catastrophe in fiscal and tax policy.

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