It Will be Either a Cold Day in Hades or a Warm Day in Minnesota When Governments Start Making Rational Spending Decisions

Liberals and progressives and those further out on the left assure me that government spending is what it is because of hard economic and social realities, certainly not because the machinery of government has self-serving incentives to spend everything given to it, then demand more! more! more!

If that's true, somebody explain to me how this shortfall occurred in a set of local Minnesota municipalities in just one year (h/t James Lileks via Instapundit)…

Lundgren said the trouble began in August when a clerk went into Mattson's file to change the designation of the property, at 233 Lake St. E., from homestead to non-homestead to reflect its change in status after its sale.

The clerk filled in the $18,900 proposed valuation, but then mistakenly hit the key to exit the program. The computer added four zeros to fill out the nine numerical spaces required by the software, thus indicating the value was $189,000,000….

The story has been creating quite a few chuckles since it began swirling around Waconia this week.

But no one is laughing at the assessor's office, where the problem started. Neither is anyone at the Carver County Board, the city of Waconia or the Waconia School District.

Those three entities -- which were counting on the $2.5 million in increased property tax collections -- now face the daunting task of raising taxes or cutting budgets to make up for the shortfall.