My main question about Tim Pawlenty’s plan to produce sustained 5 percent GDP growth over a 10-year period is why didn’t he try something like that when he was governor of Minnesota. That would have been a good deal better than the state’s actual performance:
As you can see, it’s not impossible to do 5 percent growth in Minnesota. It happened twice under Tim Pawlenty’s predecessor. But after he was inaugurated in 2003, it didn’t happen even once. Admittedly, Pawlenty was hampered by the generally poor economic conditions of the George W. Bush administration, but that hardly vindicates his tax cut fervor. Indeed, the state seems to have had below-average performance at least as often as it did above average.
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