Daily Digest: 1st District race gets interesting

Good morning and welcome to Monday, the start of another work week and an almost new month. There was a horrible shooting in Las Vegas last night and information is still coming out.  Here's the Digest.

1. State Sen. Carla Nelson, R-Rochester, is scheduled to make "a special announcement" later this morning. Given that notice of the announcement came on "Carla Nelson for Congress" letterhead, it's a pretty good bet that she's  about to join fellow Republican Jim Hagedorn in the 2018 race for Congress in Minnesota's 1st District. If she wins, it could make life difficult for Republicans in the Minnesota Senate who have just a one vote majority. And it looks like it may be difficult for Democrats to hang onto the congressional seat Tim Walz is leaving to run for governor next year. (MPR News)

2. The tax overhaul framework released last week by President Trump would do away with the popular federal deduction for state and local taxes. While Republican supporters of the plan say other tax cuts would offset those lost deductions, they have been valuable for many Minnesotans because the state has the fourth-highest income tax rate in the country. In addition, high rates of homeownership in the state would leave property taxpayers without another valuable deduction. Republican lawmakers say other parts of the plan help offset the changes and more details are yet to come, but Democrats are skeptical and critical. (Star Tribune)

3. Part of the reason for eliminating deductions and increasing the standard deduction is to simplify the tax system and make it easier to file returns, say backers of the GOP plan. While early analyses show the benefits of the framework are tilted toward top earners, some watching here in Minnesota say it's too early to draw many conclusions. And given how hard it has been for Congress to pass any major legislation, some say they don't have much confidence the tax plan will go anywhere. (MPR News)

4. In recent years, Iowa has landed big corporate names such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM, which are spending billions of dollars for new facilities and creating thousands of jobs. Minnesota, which once dominated its neighbors in attracting big-ticket corporate projects, has not done as well lately.  “Incentivizing additional job creation doesn’t make sense when we already have unemployment rates that are far below the national average,” said state Rep. Patrick Garofalo, a Republican who moved to trim the state’s economic development budget in 2016. But critics of Minnesota’s approach say the state’s healthy economy, which recovered quickly after the recession and has continued to expand, is feeding a sense of complacency. They point out that federal projections show the state’s rate of job growth slowing significantly in coming years, falling behind Iowa and almost every other Midwestern state. (Star Tribune)

5. The U.S. Supreme Court opens its new term today and will hear arguments tomorrow in a case involving how political district boundaries were drawn in Wisconsin. It's not against the law for politicians to consider politics when they're redrawing districts. But the approach Wisconsin Republicans took was particularly aggressive. Since lawmakers designed new district lines in 2011, they've kept a solid grip on power, maintaining a sizable majority in the state Legislature without a sizable majority of the vote. For example, in 2012, Republicans won 47 percent of the vote statewide but took 60 percent of seats in the Assembly. (NPR)

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