Minnesota: Taxpayers Pay Top Dollar For State Building Projects
According to KARE 11.com:
Soaring gas and food prices and sinking home values, have pretty much everybody these days managing their money differently.
But on a large government scale, the same values are harder to find. In fact, Minnesota's been spending your tax money the same way for decades and critics argue it's costing us more than ever before.
The focus here - Minnesota's prevailing wage.
The prevailing wage is the dollar amount mandated, worker to worker, for labor on the states biggest construction projects - things like roads and buildings funded by billions of your tax dollars.
Minnesota was the last state in the union to jump on the 'prevailing wage bandwagon' in 1973.
It came about after the University of Minnesota hired inexpensive out-of-state labor for a building project on one of its farms.
Prevailing wage laws were written with the goal of preventing local wages from being 'undercut' by contractors who come in with low bids, using out-of-market cheap labor.
But critics argue, what's happened over time, is that prevailing wage laws have actually seriously inflated local-wage standards whenever taxpayers are footing the bill...click to continue.
