by William Upton, The National Pulse:
Kamala Harris’s 2024 vice presidential running mate, Governor Tim Walz (D-MN), has been nothing short of a disaster for his state’s economy. Minnesotans living under Walz’s leadership have suffered:
While most of the election cycle has focused on the Biden-Harris government’s lackluster economy, high inflation, high interest rates, the border crisis, and rising concerns of a recession—a look at Walz’s economic vision should raise even more alarm bells regarding what a Harris-Walz government might do.
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The National Pulse has produced an analysis of the Walz economy in Minnesota, looking at several core factors, including its growth prospects, the impact of Walz’s environmentalist policies, and whether taxpayers and businesses have decided to remain in the state as a result.
In 2023, Minnesota’s annual state GDP growth ranked 43rd in the country. Over the course of last year, the state’s economy only grew at a minuscule rate of 1.2 percent from 2022. This was nearly twice as slow as the national Biden-Harris economy, which saw annualized growth at 2.5 percent.
The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce notes that despite the overall U.S. recovery post-COVID-19 pandemic—itself hampered by the high-inflationary policies of the Biden-Harris government—the state’s recovery has lagged even further behind. According to the Chamber, “…the state recovered and grew at just half the rate of the U.S. and ranked in the bottom 20 states across most major economic growth indicators.”
Energy policy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling produced an interesting look at the impact Gov. Walz’s radical environmentalist agenda has had on the critical manufacturing industry in Minnesota. They found that Walz’s green-energy mandate has caused industrial electricity rates in the state to outpace the U.S. average far. In fact, the cost of power has become so severe, it has forced companies to actually close shop entirely.
On March 1 of this year, Metal Technologies Incorporated (MTI) was forced to close its foundry facilities in Hibbing, Minnesota, due to the prohibitive cost of energy in the state. “Electricity cost is a major expense,” MTI said in a press release announcing the closure. The Indiana-based company with facilities across the Midwest continued: ” Minnesota Power’s repeated electricity rate increases … mean Northern Foundry pays substantially more per kilowatt hour than MTI’s other facilities.”
The analysis by Orr and Rolling shows that Minnesota Power, the electricity provider for the region where Hibbing is located, saw industrial electricity rates 27 percent higher than the U.S. average in 2023. They estimate that the Northern Foundry facility likely used over 30,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity annually—primarily to power electric induction furnaces used for melting iron. Orr and Rolling estimated that the overall rise in power costs meant the company faced around a $1.2 million electric bill—about 27 percent of its payroll.
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