Brian Grogan for Minnesota House: Making Tough Choices

Originally published at Fightin’ Words

For over a year, I have maintained a quasi-weekly podcast, mostly as a cathartic release for my own political and cultural frustration. As new and more effective opportunities for activism have presented themselves, it has become more difficult to divert the time and effort necessary to keep the show going. However, there was one final guest I wished to host, and am glad I did.

For your consideration, I present a candid interview with Brian Grogan, the Republican endorsed candidate for Minnesota House in District 43B. Discussing education, business, and local government aid among other issues, he credits voters with the maturity to understand the truth – that our public policy choices are hard and cannot be avoided if we hope to preserve our future.

If we really do want to address the serious deficiencies we have – and this a huge issue that far too many legislators are not willing to talk about, and Republicans and Democrats are both guilty of this… our choices today aren’t good, bad, and worse. We have no good choices today. Our choices truly are bad and worse. And what I mean by that [is], our two areas which we have out of control spending in right now more than anything else are health and human services, which is health care, and it is our welfare system.

We have got to start saying “no.” We can’t do it. We can’t afford it. That means people will hurt. We have to get back to the philosophy of personal responsibility. Certain people have just got to stand up and care of themselves. They can’t look to the government to care of them. We have got to start rooting out fraud. To do that, we have got to start saying “no…”

Those are the bad choices. The worse choice is we just keep going on, and this is really what frightens me. Often times, we listen to Democrats like Dayton… who say all we have to do is raise taxes and we’re gonna be just fine. But there’s a structural deficit in our spending of about $500 billion dollars, and that’s just in the state of Minnesota. It’s close to a half a million dollars… We can’t just raise taxes and take care of this. It’s just not gonna resolve it. If we get into a squeeze in our bond markets, if somehow we go into a double-dip recession – which is a very possible scenario, you’re gonna see a house of cards tumbling here that could lead to a very frightening situation for states.

Check out the whole interview here.

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• Governor Pawlenty Appoints Brian Grogan to MAEF
• Senator Rudy Boschwitz Endorses Brian Grogan