Can Minnesota Afford ICE Much Longer?

Will the Federal Occupation Drain State Budgets in Minnesota?

The state of Minnesota gets the state budget primarily through individual income tax, a general sales tax, and corporate taxes. Roughly half of the entire Minnesota state budget comes from individual income taxes.

States like Florida and Texas gladly and routinely tell their citizens to F*ck off and it doesn’t matter because the states don’t get their budgets from individual income taxes anyway. But Minnesota is a different ball game.

The longer people go without going to work because of military occupation, the less the state makes because of declining incomes. This is in addition to people moving out of state permanently or temporarily because they don’t feel safe. And additionally people missing work because they have been injured by ICE agents, or are sick from gas inhalation.

And obviously the less people are out spending money, either because they can’t leave their homes or because they left the house, this means less money paid in sales taxes. In addition to people working and making money in their state, Minnesota also needs people out spending money in their state so they collect the sales taxes.

Also, states pay unemployment. So if a lot of people are unemployed or not working all at the same time, this could bankrupt a state. This is the reason many states could only do lockdowns during Covid for a month or two.

The state is paying out overtime to law enforcement to keep the peace as well as state guard or any state employees deployed.

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that Minneapolis alone has already paid out $2 million in overtime to police in the past 2 months.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Sunday that Minneapolis has already spent more than $2 million on overtime for police officers dealing with the fallout of a nearly two-month-long surge of federal immigration agents in the state.

“This surge has drained local law enforcement time and resources,” Ellison, who is expected to appear in federal court Monday morning to argue for a temporary restraining order against the surge, told reporters.

A portion of the Minneapolis police budget comes from the state of Minnesota.

This is important to note because how the state handles this escalating situation with the federal government now determines what their future budgets will look like.

The less money they have next year, the even less likely they’ll be properly equipped to withstand another attack from the federal government. The federal government may possibly be using these ICE attacks to drain state budgets and resources to make them less resilient in the future.