Minnesota got a dose of mixed budget news Tuesday with finance officials predicting a small surplus will accrue by next summer but a deficit will have to be repaired for the two years that follow.
“Someone told me this morning they had forgotten you could get good news in 2020,” Gov. Tim Walz said. “The reason this is good is because of the resiliency of Minnesotans.”
In Washington Just hours after a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers revealed a $908 billion legislative framework to try to break a monthslong impasse on a new round of pandemic-related relief measures, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters he's talking to administration officials about a separate coronavirus bill that President Donald Trump will sign.
"Waiting for next year is not an answer," McConnell said. He also said a spending bill being negotiated now by the House and Senate would serve as a vehicle for passing more pandemic aid.
States with few coronavirus restrictions are spreading the virus beyond their borders Nowhere are these regulatory disparities more counterproductive and jarring than in the border areas between restrictive and permissive states; for example, between Washington and Idaho, Minnesota and South Dakota, and Illinois and Iowa. In each pairing, one state has imposed tough and sometimes unpopular restrictions on behavior, only to be confounded by a neighbor’s leniency. Like factories whose emissions boost asthma rates for miles around, a state’s lax public health policies can wreak damage beyond its borders.
