The race between 3rd District Representative Erik Paulsen and millionaire liquor heir Dean Phillips presents some interesting contrasts for voters’ consideration in this year’s off year election.

First of all, Phillips is in complete lockstep with his fellow DFL politicians in regards to the 2017 tax reform act, bemoaning them as deficit expanding “Tax Cuts for the Rich”, while Paulsen rightly sees them as super fuel for an economic growth machine and tax revenue builder that continues to embarrass its critics, day after day and year after year. What Congressman Paulsen gets, and Dean Phillips doesn’t, is what Ronald Reagan tried to tell us years ago; “Business doesn’t PAY taxes, it COLLECTS them!”.

Any business, no matter what its form, is really nothing more than a “pass-thru” entity. It buys some form of raw material, employs both labor and capital to make something from it, and then sells the resulting product or service to whoever is willing to pay for it. The excess of sales over costs, or profit, goes to expand and grow, buy more labor and capital, and then to compensate the owners and risk takers who created and continue the enterprise into the future.

When any government arbitrarily confiscates a portion of that excess of sales over cost, the business will have no choice but to collect the tax from the several constituent groups that it serves. It collects the tax from consumers in the form of higher prices, from employees in the form of lower wages and fewer benefits, from the owners in the form of lower dividends, and most tragic of all from the community at large in the form of fewer new job opportunities.

Erik Paulsen understands that increasing business taxes will lead to slower growth and higher unemployment. Slower growth and higher unemployment will result in lower tax revenue and increasing social support program expenses, exploding government deficits. Congressman Paulsen understands that we need only enough tax revenue to sustain essential government services. Big Government cannot offer the empowering work opportunities that a vibrant free market economy can offer and is offering today.

Finally, the other notion that Representative Paulsen gets, that Dean Phillips doesn’t, is the “signal-to-noise” ratio built into our current national political environment. Erik is almost the living and breathing personification of the idea that policy is what really matters, and that personality is nothing but a noisy distraction.

Throughout his service to the citizens of Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District, Erik Paulsen has calmly and persistently advanced well researched and thoroughly vetted policy to make government work for all of it’s people. He has consistently avoided the personality feuds and ego collisions, and the daily doomsday fetishes that the news headlines seem to relish so much and worked effectively across party lines to get things done. In a room full of screaming crazies and rabid character assassins, Erik Paulsen is truly “the adult in the room”!