Billionaire Governor Taxed The Rich & Increased Minimum Wage: Look What Happened
When Minnesota governor Mark Dayton took office in January of 2011 he inherited quite the difficult situation to turn around. The midwestern state was drowning in a $6.2 billion budget deficit and had a troubling 7% unemployment rate.
Coming in on the heels of Tim Pawlenty, a leader who failed to generate any substantial new revenue and created only 6,200 new jobs, the pressure was on for Dayton to do better. As the billionaire heir to the Target fortune, many didn’t expect Dayton to be capable of much of anything, but now, over 5 years in office, he has effected real change for the North Star State.
To do this, Governor Dayton implemented two key factors that to many may seem commonsensical: he implemented higher taxes on the rich and increased minimum wage.