Unallotment was Pawlenty's answer to a very real problem

On sober hindsight, is it really surprising that a judge in Ramsey County last week ruled against a small portion of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's biennial budget unallotment?

Political and ideological jousting aside, never in Minnesota's now-152-year history (albeit a mere 70 years since unalloting first became possible) had a governor ever done anything like it. It's hard to imagine a court someplace in the state not issuing at least a "whoa, pardner" at some point. That point came Wednesday, when District Judge Kathleen Gearin ruled that the governor had "trod on the constitutional power of the Legislature."

Do I still support, for reasons I'll get to in a second, how the governor cut $2.7 billion, and do I wish the judge had come down differently? Yes, surely.

Do I pretend to know what the new legal and budget-fixing landscape will look like after lawyers representing an exponentially increasing number of sides finish dueling? Not a chance.

Instead, my main interest and concern continue to pivot on how in the world Minnesota and the whole of the United States will come even close to balancing the books over the next generation.

Call Pawlenty's strategy an artifice, if you choose. Call it something worse, if you prefer. But whatever and however you think about it -- enthusiastically, disgustedly, or indifferently -- the fact remains we have entered an extended period in our state and nation's life in which public balance sheets just don't and won't jibe. Too many physically depleted and fiscally depleting baby boomers (like me). Not nearly enough other people to underwrite Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the rest. What to do?

Don't like unalloting? What might you suggest? What might you recommend, especially since it's essential that taxes, at all levels, remain as low as possible for as long as possible given how they'll have to be raised, almost certainly, once multiple entitlement crises hit with full and unprecedented force? Some colleagues on the right are not entirely pleased when I predict such things, but given convincing and nasty projections, I see no escape, both when it comes to confronting inescapably huge expenses as well as responsibly paying our bills.

A commencing future like this requires a frugality unlike any we've known since World War II and the Great Depression immediately before, both of which are beyond the visceral memory of almost everyone in public life. Such a scaled-down approach to nonmilitary spending would be acutely hard even if legislative bodies in Washington and state capitals across the country were well-practiced at paring and subtracting programs and expenses. But, of course, the opposite has been true, in often extravagant style, for nearly a half-century now.

All of which raises a pretty obvious -- but not at all pretty -- question: Absent decisive actions by chief executives like governors and presidents, is it realistic to expect legislative bodies -- every single member of which has his or her favorite causes and demanding constituencies -- to adequately rein in spending in this new era?

We had best hope so, regardless of how Minnesota's judicial branch eventually settles current frictions between the other two.

Mitch Pearlstein is founder and president of Center of the American Experiment, which describes itself as a public policy and educational institution that brings conservative and free market ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing Minnesota and the nation.

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