I am shocked, just shocked I tell you!

The Governor has released that he is planning a huge 1.6% increase for education and Medicaid.  This, despite the fact that sales taxes have been up on average more than 3% for the last three years.  This despite the fact that South Dakota will have an extra $70 million that was not expected.  This despite tourism taxes and contractor excise tax have grown slightly and stayed steady over the last three years.  

Bob Mercer calls the Governor "frugal."  Leo Kallis compares the upcoming bout over education funding and common core to living in a frat movie.  Cory Heidelberger compares the Governor to the Soup Nazi.  I offer my comparison to that of Dickens's Scrooge.  Here are a few quotations that remind me of our fair Governor:

There is nothing on which [the world] is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth. 

What’s Christmas time... but a time for paying bills without money. 

If [the poor] would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. 

Now that the Democrats have a candidate to run against Daugaard, I would encourage that candidate to remind our current Governor of what he wrote when he first ran for the office.

South Dakota’s system of funding K-12 education is a sound system at its core. To the degree that there is dissatisfaction with the funding formula, I believe it is largely due to the amount of funds distributed through the formula. When our budget picture improves, I hope to increase the funding that is available. 

The funding is available, but Mr. Scrooge in Pierre doesn't want to buy any more coal or give to those in need because it is to important that he hoards is away.