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Photo: Dave Madgett • Superior National ForestPosts, press releases, and commentary from the campaign.
Photo: Dave Madgett • Superior National ForestMinnesota by the Numbers — 14 articles built from primary sources on the economy, fraud, public safety, health care, housing, and schools. Start here →
Minnesota's Legislature writes organizations' names directly into its budget laws, 1,122 times from 2021 to 2026, and the lines in this piece carry no condition that would stop the money. I screened 502 organizations. I didn't find a hidden fraud ring. I found a Legislature that kept restating lines after the state's own watchdogs had put a problem on paper, and agencies that paid because the law said to. Here's the record, the other side's case, and the sentence that fixes it.
Read MoreOn October 1 the Attorney General's office sued Refocus Recovery, a peer-recovery nonprofit that stopped operating in September 2024, for passing nearly all its Medicaid money to its founder's for-profit company. The allegations are serious and unproven. But the structure isn't the scandal. Kaiser Permanente's nonprofit health plan paid one medical group $16.2 billion in 2024. The forest is a Minnesota rule that only lets a nonprofit bill Medicaid as a recovery community organization, so a for-profit that wanted in had to build one. The complaint leans on Refocus's tax return for its numbers and never mentions what that return says about recusal. Here's the record, the other side's case, and a fix.
Read MoreA CNN clip of Attorney General Keith Ellison cutting off a question about sponsored travel is circulating again. The reporting is from March 2025. CNN asked why he goes on trips sponsored by corporate lobbyists. The records it reported raise the questions that matter more, who paid, who was there and what was discussed, and I can't find that his office has ever answered them. Minnesota's statement of economic interest never asks about travel by name; the honorarium line is the one place it might reach. Wisconsin's form asks. The U.S. House makes members file within 15 days. Here's the record, the other side's best case, and a fix that costs nothing.
Read MoreEvery Minnesota county is required to run a conciliation court. The jurisdictional limit is $20,000 — raised from $15,000 in 2024 — the court administrator has to help you fill out the form, and a lawyer is optional. In 2025, 61,393 conciliation cases were filed, up 63 percent since 2021. There is a second, much lower limit that only binds the creditor suing you. There are four numbers the state does not publish. And there is one thing this forum cannot do for you at all.
Read MoreChapter 59B exempts service-contract sellers from state licensing and from every provision of the insurance code but one. Its definition of a protected buyer is keyed to tangible personal property — which a furnace bolted into a house is not, and which Congress fixed in 1975 with a 25-word parenthetical Minnesota never copied. Whether a home warranty is inside the chapter at all is unresolved on the face of the statute. Here is what the text says, and what it withholds.
Read MoreTwo separate 2026 acts rewrote the Minnesota Common Interest Ownership Act. One of them amended the insurance section itself — and did not touch the sentence that decides who pays a deductible. The other added a loss-assessment warning to the annual report and the resale certificate. Here is the mechanism, what changed, what did not, and why no public Minnesota dataset can tell you how much money moves through it.
Read MoreThe FTC Funeral Rule took effect in 1984 and was last revised in 1994, and the Commission itself says it reaches only in-person visitors — no website, no posting, nothing you can look up in advance. Minnesota's chapter 149A goes further than the federal rule in at least nine specific ways, including covering cemeteries and headstones, which the FTC declined to reach. Who enforces what, and what the numbers can and cannot tell you.
Read MoreEveryone has heard about Minnesota's criminal election-deepfake law, because the tech companies sued over it. Almost nobody has heard about section 604.32, the civil claim the same 2023 bill created for a person whose face is put on a fabricated sex image. I read all nine subdivisions, and then I went looking for who has used it — which turns out to be a harder question than it sounds, because Minnesota does not publish an answer.
Read MoreAcross 273 Minnesota school systems in school year 2017-18 — the most recent year both federal files can be joined — the correlation between revenue per pupil and reading proficiency is negative, −0.45. That is not a finding about money. It is an artifact of a formula that sends dollars toward measured need: economic disadvantage alone explains 62 percent of the district-level variation in reading, and adding revenue to the model moves the explained share from 0.645 to 0.649. What the public files can and cannot answer, which dataset would answer it, and who would have to publish it.
Read MoreThe charity-care statute sets no income line — the hospital's own policy does. The one income number in Minnesota's charity-care law, 275 percent of the federal poverty guideline, is a reporting category in an administrative rule, not a right. The screening duty reaches uninsured patients and hospitals, not insured patients and not clinics. And the state's own hospital file shows $202.8 million written off as bad debt in 2024 rather than as charity care.
Read MoreRed Lake County has zero certified nursing homes. Seventeen more counties have one building each, at a median of 46 beds, and nine of those seventeen have already lost one since 2012. But the closures do not track population loss — in all 40 counties that lost a nursing home, the 65-and-over population was larger in 2024 than in 2020. What separates the counties is not who closed. It is who got replaced.
Read MoreOne adjustment formula governs the homestead, the car, the tools, and the wildcard. On July 1, 2026 it moved the homestead cap 5.9 percent and the ordinary motor-vehicle cap 2.0 percent, because each raise is a slice of a base amount and the car's base is still $2,000. Two exemptions are excluded from the formula by name and have sat at $13,000 since 1989 — down 62.7 percent in purchasing power. And the state's own notice of the new figures was wrong twice before it was right.
Read MoreMinn. Stat. § 13.824 requires the BCA to post the locations of fixed automated license plate readers on its website, and it does: as of September 10, 2026, 116 agencies, 747 named locations, 17 more withheld as security information. Statewide, camera density tracks city size, not race. Inside Minneapolis, the 28 mappable readers sit in tracts that are 39.0 percent non-Hispanic white against 58.0 percent citywide — and once you hold the arterial and the reported crime rate constant, that gap disappears. The disclosure law works. The published list is still a text file with no coordinates, no counts, and no dates.
Read MoreMinnesota's pretrial share of the jail population climbed from 50 percent in 2010 to 68 percent in 2019. The Rules of Criminal Procedure require a judge to set a cash figure that buys release with no conditions at all, which means the same defendant walks or stays depending on what is in the bank. Jail rates per 100,000: 107 white, 685 Black, 1,255 Native American. And a rule already on the books that nobody enforces.
Read MoreA flat fee is a percentage that shrinks as income rises. Minnesota's $75 conviction surcharge is identical for a felony and a petty misdemeanor, the minimum fine underneath it is fixed at 30 percent of the statutory maximum and by law cannot be waived, and getting a revoked license back can cost $680. Minnesota already fixed the worst piece of this. Here is what is left, and the fix the state has already written into another statute.
Read MoreMinnesota's landlord-tenant chapter runs to nearly a hundred sections, and a long list of them cannot be waived by anything a tenant signs. A landlord must send a specific 14-day letter with six specific things in it before filing for nonpayment. An eviction record comes off the public file by operation of statute in five situations, no motion required. And on August 1, 2026, the rent-payment rules changed. This is what the statutes say, not advice about anyone's situation.
Read MoreChapter 62W makes pharmacy benefit managers hold a state license, disclose the spread, and stop clawing back money from pharmacies and from you. It does not ban spread pricing. And the annual transparency report Commerce publishes is unaudited and anonymous — twelve of the thirty reports filed for 2024 say the company kept nothing. Here is how the money actually moves, what Minnesota law reaches, and where federal law stops it.
Read MoreState law requires two hours of nursing personnel per resident per 24 hours and a nurse on site eight hours a day. It does not say who is on the floor at 2 a.m. Minnesota's answer to that question is not a staffing ratio — it is a nine-member wage board, and on September 10 its floors finally reach a paycheck. Four in ten Minnesota nursing home workers still leave within a year, and raising the floor bills a state that has already capped what it will pay.
Read MoreChapter 103H says groundwater should be kept free from degradation caused by human activities, and it builds a ladder from voluntary practices to enforceable orders. The Groundwater Protection Rule wired the top of that ladder to public wells. In eight southeast counties, the people at risk are on private wells. Eleven organizations petitioned EPA in 2023 to force the issue. Here is exactly what EPA did, what it did not do, and what the state's own quarterly numbers show through March 31, 2026.
Read MoreSince January 1, 2025, advertising a price that leaves out a mandatory fee has been a deceptive trade practice in Minnesota. The prohibition is one sentence. The qualifications run nine paragraphs and three industry exemptions. I read all of it, because the carve-outs are where the money is — and because nothing in this law makes anything cheaper.
Read MoreA $24.6 billion grocery merger was blocked in Portland in December 2024 by the FTC and nine state and district plaintiffs. Minnesota was not one of them. Minnesota's own antitrust law has been on the books for fifty-five years, it awards treble damages to shoppers who never bought a thing from the defendant, and it hands the Attorney General discovery power before a complaint is ever filed. This is an argument about the tool, not about the man holding it.
Read MoreThe gift-card scam runs on a script, and the script is the most useful thing anyone can hand you. Minnesota's gift-certificate law regulates fees and expiration dates — it says nothing about fraud. The financial-exploitation crime is real, but 'vulnerable adult' is a defined term, and most independently living retirees do not meet it. Here is what the statutes actually do, what reaches the caller, and why the money is almost never coming back.
Read MoreMinnesota is one of the states that compensates people it wrongly imprisoned. The Incarceration and Exoneration Remedies Act sets a floor of $50,000 per year of incarceration, a figure the Legislature wrote in 2014 and has never adjusted. In twelve years the state has appropriated money to pay seventeen people a total of $9,214,999.36. And the statute still routes a won award back to the Legislature 'for consideration as an appropriation,' which means winning and getting paid are two different events.
Read MoreMinnesota's red-flag law and its private-transfer background check have been argued about for three years by people quoting each other instead of the text. I pulled both statutes raw and read every subdivision. The red-flag law is not seizure on an anonymous tip — the list of who may petition is closed and short. The transfer law is not a registry — the record stays in your hands, not the state's. And there is a real due-process problem in the emergency order that neither side is being honest about.
Read MoreIn 2023 Minnesota added twenty-four words to the definitions section of the Human Rights Act. It did not write a grooming statute. It put hair texture and hair styles inside the word 'race,' which runs through the Act's employment, public-accommodations, education, housing, and public-services provisions. That changes what a worker sent home over her hair is holding. It does not change what she still has to prove, and Minnesota does not publish a single number telling us whether anyone has used it.
Read MoreThe Sentencing Guidelines Commission's own 2024 tables: 1,243 Black adults sentenced per 100,000, against 201 white; American Indians at 1,809. Yet at the sentencing hearing, judges cut prison time below the guideline more often for Black defendants than white ones. The disparity is built upstream, in who gets charged and in the guideline grid itself. What the numbers show, what they can't, and what to change.
Read MoreMinnesotans repeat a flattering line about the U that does not survive ten minutes with a federal spreadsheet. Here is the real number — $1.41 billion, twenty-first in the country — and why the real number is still the argument. The asset almost nobody counts is the other one: a 54-campus state college system that reaches the parts of Minnesota no data center ever will.
Read MoreThe AI inside the software your hospital, your bank, and your school district buy was mostly downloaded free from a public library of models. That library has had at least five separate security incidents in three years — leaked keys, malicious files, an evaded scanner, a breached platform, and a backdoor hidden in the math itself. The defenses that followed were fast and real, and there is now a scanner that looks for the last of the five. A scanner is not a proof. That gap is a market, and Minnesota should own it.
Read MoreMinnesota gives you the right to demand why an automated system turned you down, see the data behind it, and have the decision run again on corrected facts. Then the same statute exempts the banks, the insurers, and the employment file — most of the industries that do the turning down. Here is what a Minnesota AI standard would say, built out of the law we already have and the gap we already left, and what our Legislature's near-miss got right and got wrong.
Read MoreMinnesota won a federal Tech Hub designation in 2023 and got none of the $504 million that followed. The state runs an AI governance subcommittee and has announced an AI fraud-detection pilot, and neither one funds research. I am not going to name an appropriation — that number belongs in a bill drafted by people who cost it. What I will argue is the structure that has to come attached to it before the number matters at all.
Read MoreAustin landed MCC in 1983 and SEMATECH five years later, and people have been citing it as the model for regional tech development ever since. I've cited it myself. Both of those wins ended: MCC's board voted to dissolve it in 2000, and SEMATECH moved its headquarters to Albany in 2007 after New York offered more than Texas matched. What left was the part that had been bought. What stayed was the part that had been built into people.
Read MoreThe famous paperclip story is twenty-three years old, usually misquoted, and has taken serious published criticism I give here in full. What survives it is the part a state should care about: nobody can currently prove that a large AI system does what its builders intended and nothing else. That is an engineering problem with real results and real limits — and Minnesota buys these systems.
Read MoreArtificial intelligence is the biggest economic and safety question of the next decade, and Minnesota is sitting on the assets to lead it: one of the largest research universities in the country and a statewide network of state colleges. Austin built a tech capital around a university. We can build the North's — around the thing the industry is most desperate for and least able to supply on its own: trust.
Read MoreSubsidize demand' versus 'government shouldn't be in it' both miss the problem: in much of Minnesota there is no child care to buy at any price. Treat it as the workforce infrastructure it is — right-size the rules that make a small provider impossible, back shared-services networks so a home provider isn't also a lone accountant, and bring employers in. Same logic as the rent piece: fix supply.
Read MoreWhen a Democrat consumer lawyer and Donald Trump agree that the credit card industry is fleecing people, it's not a left-or-right issue — it's an everyone-versus-the-industry issue. Sky-high rates, junk fees, and an arbitration clause that hides it all and blocks you from fighting back. Here's the whole machine, and what a state can actually do about it.
Read MoreThe cannabis debate is 'legalize more, faster' versus 'the rollout is a mess, crack down.' Both miss the scandal this series already surfaced: thousands of racially lopsided charges for cannabis in a vehicle under a traffic statute that survived legalization. Close that gap, unstick the social-equity and tribal licenses, and make the legal market actually work.
Read MoreMore school funding' versus 'vouchers' is the wrong fight. Reading is the one outcome that predicts everything else, and Minnesota already passed the law requiring evidence-based instruction. My position: enforce it, publish every school's results plainly, supercharge public open enrollment so a family can leave a failing school, and tie a slice of funding to actual reading gains. Accountability inside the public system — not an exit from it.
Read MoreKeep the clean-energy goal, but tie the pace to a public reliability-and-affordability dashboard. And make the case conservatives should already be making: a grid built around a few giant plants and substations is a single point of failure — one attack, one storm, one cyber-intrusion from the dark. Rooftop solar, batteries, and microgrids aren't a climate program. They're resilience. That's a security argument, and it's one everyone can sign.
Read MoreThe same clause that locks you out of court can be turned into a weapon against the companies that wrote it. Mass arbitration, the 2022 sexual-harassment carve-out, and a debt-collection hypocrisy that Minnesota can attack head-on. The hopeful chapter of the arbitration story — and the agenda a state attorney general can actually run.
Read MoreOccupational licensing is sold as consumer protection, and sometimes it is. Too often it's a guild — a wall that keeps out the immigrant, the military spouse, the person leaving prison, and the worker who learned the trade in another state. Recognize legitimate licenses by default, sunset the ones that guard insiders, and keep the ones that actually guard safety. It's progressive and deregulatory at the same time.
Read MoreThe homelessness debate is 'unconditional housing forever' versus 'sweep the camps,' and neither is a plan. Mine: rapid shelter and housing paired with real engagement — treatment, case management — and every dollar tied to one outcome, cost per person housed and kept housed. Turn the money toward what works and off the contracts that just perpetuate themselves.
Read MoreForced arbitration is the fine-print clause that quietly cancels your Seventh Amendment right to sue in court and hands your case to a private judge the company picks. More than 85 million American workers and hundreds of millions of consumers are bound by it. Here is how a 1925 law for merchants became the most powerful shield corporations have — drawn from my book, The Rigged Court.
Read MoreThe kids-and-screens debate bounces between 'ban the app' panic and 'that's the parents' problem.' Here's a lawyer's fix instead: platforms serving Minnesota minors owe them a duty of loyalty — designed for the child's interest, not maximum engagement — enforceable by the Attorney General. We already impose that duty on everyone else entrusted with something precious.
Read MoreSkip the single-payer-versus-free-market fight. The state already buys an enormous share of Minnesota's health care — Medicaid, MinnesotaCare, public employees. Use that leverage: demand real all-payer price transparency, pay reference prices, and refuse to keep signing secret contracts. That's not ideology. It's what any large customer does.
Read MoreForced arbitration's cruelest feature isn't that you usually lose. It's that it's secret. No public record, no precedent, no pattern exposed — so the same fraud runs on the next person, and the next. This is how arbitration hides what banks and credit card companies do to people, told partly through my own case.
Read MoreWarehouse, meatpacking, and hospital work destroys bodies — repetitive-motion injuries, wrecked backs, torn shoulders. Minnesota's 2023 ergonomics law makes large employers in those three industries build real injury-prevention programs. It's a quiet, physical kind of worker protection, and it targets exactly the jobs that are booming.
Read MoreDefund' versus 'lock everyone up' is an argument about punishment. The real scandal is clearance rates: most crimes, including serious ones, never result in anyone being identified, let alone charged. A crime with no consequence isn't reform and isn't toughness — it's impunity. Fund investigation, measure cases solved, and the rest of the debate gets a lot smaller.
Read MoreFor the first time, Minnesota rideshare drivers have a legally guaranteed minimum: a per-mile and per-minute rate, a $5 floor per trip, tips on top, and pay owed even when the app fails to collect the fare. The companies said the state couldn't do this without driving them out. It could, it did, and they're still here.
Read MoreMinnesota settled the legal question by statute in 2023, and I defend that right without qualification. Then I want to change the subject to the thing that actually reduces abortions — and that both sides can work on: making it possible to afford a child. Contraception, prenatal and postpartum support, child care, and a humane adoption path.
Read MoreEvery dollar Minnesota claws back from fraud, overpayment, and waste should go straight back to Minnesotans as a visible, universal rebate. It turns anti-fraud enforcement into something that pays you directly, gives government efficiency a constituency instead of a slogan, and ends the tired raise-taxes-versus-cut-taxes loop.
Read MoreMinnesota now requires employers with 30 or more workers to put a real salary range in every job posting — no more open-ended ranges, no more 'competitive pay.' It's one of the cheapest, most popular worker protections there is, and it does more against the gender and racial pay gap than a dozen speeches.
Read MoreMisclassification — labeling an employee a 'contractor' to dodge the obligations of employing them — cheats the worker, the honest competitor who plays by the rules, and every taxpayer. It's rampant in construction. Minnesota's strengthened 2024 law raises the penalties and puts the people who run the scheme personally on the hook.
Read MoreA common-sense immigration position for a state that can't set immigration law but can decide how its own police spend their time. Local officers exist to keep the community safe, not to run federal errands. If someone is genuinely violent and removal is the tool, use it. Everyone else — the neighbor who works, pays taxes, and raises kids here — we actively protect. That's a Minnesota value.
Read MoreManufactured-home parks are some of the last naturally affordable housing in Minnesota — and their residents own their homes but rent the land underneath. That's a trap: an investor buys the park, raises the lot rent or closes it, and homes that can't really be moved become worthless. Minnesota's law gives residents notice, relocation compensation, and a shot at buying the park themselves.
Read MoreThe gun debate is stuck because both sides keep arguing about the rifle while most Minnesotans who die by a gun die by their own hand. Here's a negotiation, not a wish list: three terms a serious gun owner can sign, each one traded for something the other side actually wants. Aim the policy at the real deaths, and give the other side the due process it's right to demand.
Read MoreThe trans-athlete debate is two groups talking past each other — one in the language of biology, the other in the language of identity. Here's a fix that doesn't require either side to surrender its vocabulary: keep the women's category protected, and rename the other one what it already is — Open. Then decide the hard edges by age, stakes, and sport, not from the Capitol.
Read MoreMinnesota's law bans knowingly spreading AI-generated 'deep fakes' of candidates near an election. It's an early, serious attempt to defend democracy from synthetic media. It's also being challenged on First Amendment grounds by a satirist, by Elon Musk's X, and by xAI. This one has no easy answer, and I won't pretend it does.
Read MoreHard rent caps choke the new housing that actually lowers rents — economists across the spectrum agree on that. Doing nothing leaves sitting tenants exposed to gouging. My position splits the difference on purpose: protect the tenant who's already there, exempt new construction so we never punish building, and give renters a real shot at owning.
Read MoreThe insulin law rescued one medicine. The Prescription Drug Affordability Board is the systemic version: an expert panel that can review the most expensive drugs and set an upper limit on what's paid for them in Minnesota. It's a genuinely new kind of power over pharma — and the statute even includes a severability clause, because everyone knew the lawsuits were coming.
Read MoreMinnesota is one of a handful of states that still bans most corporations and investment funds from owning farmland or farming it. The law exists to protect the family farm as the basic unit of rural life. The threats to it aren't foreign — they're the loopholes, the shell entities, and whether anyone is actually watching.
Read MoreThere's a real trick to defeat license-plate surveillance: title your car to a trust or LLC, so a plate lookup returns the entity, not your name. The wealthy already do it. But it costs money most people don't have — which turns privacy into a luxury good. The answer isn't to make everyone hire a lawyer. It's to regulate the surveillance.
Read MoreMinnesota now makes it illegal to discipline or fire a worker for refusing to attend an employer meeting about the boss's political or religious opinions — the classic 'captive audience' meeting used to pressure workers during union drives. It's a free-speech-for-workers law, and it's being contested nationally on exactly that ground.
Read MoreMinnesota's automatic voter registration flips the default: eligible people are registered when they interact with the DMV or state health programs, with citizenship verified, unless they opt out. It's a quiet, secure way to keep the rolls accurate and complete — and it deserves a fair accounting of both what it does and what critics fear.
Read MoreThe student-loan servicer — the middleman who takes your payment and is supposed to get you into the right repayment or forgiveness plan — has a long record of misapplied payments and bad advice, and you never picked them. Minnesota's Student Loan Borrower Bill of Rights makes servicers get a state license and answer to the Commissioner of Commerce and the Attorney General.
Read MoreMinnesota's Earned Sick and Safe Time law gives every employee one hour of paid leave for every 30 hours worked — usable when you're sick, when your kid is sick, or when you're fleeing domestic violence. It's a quiet, sweeping change most people still don't know they're covered by. Here's how it works, including the part small businesses are right to find hard.
Read MoreMinnesota's Digital Fair Repair Act, one of the first broad right-to-repair laws in the country, forces electronics makers to sell the same parts, tools, and manuals to you and your corner repair shop that they give their own authorized technicians. Here's what it covers, what it pointedly doesn't, and why the fight isn't over.
Read MoreThe 2023 Restore the Vote Act re-enfranchised more than 50,000 Minnesotans by restoring the vote the moment a person leaves incarceration, instead of making them finish years of probation first. Challengers said it violated the state constitution. The Minnesota Supreme Court left the law in place in 2024 — but on standing, without deciding the constitutional question.
Read MoreIn much of America a two-week payday loan carries an annual rate of 300%, 400%, even higher. Minnesota caps small payday loans at 50% APR, caps larger consumer loans at 36%, and — the sophisticated part — its 2023 anti-evasion law reaches through the 'rent-a-bank' schemes lenders use to pretend they're someone else. Here's how the protection actually works.
Read MoreBeginning January 1, 2026, nearly every Minnesota worker is covered by state-run paid family and medical leave — up to 20 weeks a year for a new baby, a serious illness, or caring for a dying parent. It's a state stepping in where the country never has. Here's how it works, what it costs, and why the rollout deserves both support and scrutiny.
Read MoreSince July 1, 2023, Minnesota law makes nearly every employment non-compete 'void and unenforceable.' It's one of the strongest worker-freedom laws in the country — one of only a few states to ban them outright — and the federal government just tried and failed to do the same. Here's what it does, and the loophole it leaves open.
Read MoreThe Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act guarantees a Minnesotan in urgent need a 30-day insulin supply for a $35 co-pay, and a longer safety net for the low-income uninsured. The insulin makers went to federal court arguing the mandate is an unconstitutional 'taking' of their property. The case is still unresolved — and the program is still saving lives.
Read MoreA 2023 law requires big Minnesota health-care mergers to be reported and reviewed — and routes the largest deals to the Attorney General before they close. In a state where hospital consolidation keeps driving up prices and closing rural services, that's a real lever. The question is whether the person holding it will use it.
Read MoreAnders Folk went on active duty as a Marine judge advocate after September 11th. I was an Air Force JAG officer. Here is what that training does to a lawyer, why I weigh Folk's military service so heavily for Hennepin County Attorney, and why the federal relationships it built are exactly the kind of connection Minnesota needs in times like these.
Read MoreMinnesota's homestead exemption is generous. Its everyday-property exemptions — the car, the tools of your trade, the bank-account 'wild card' — are thin and lag inflation. This is the companion argument to the homestead series: an exemption too low doesn't collect more debt, it just strips a struggling family of the things it needs to recover and get back to work.
Read MoreA debt buyer pays four cents on the dollar for your old account, sues, wins by default because you didn't know to show up, and gets a judgment that lasts ten years — renewable to twenty. Minnesota actually fixed some of the worst parts. Here's what it got right, and the gap that's left.
Read MoreForeign investors hold 1.9 percent of Minnesota farmland — below the national average, and Chinese holdings total 442 acres. But we have a 1977 law against it that has apparently never been enforced, a half-built steel mill that taught us what leverage looks like, and a states'-rights toolbox most politicians treat as a bumper sticker. The verified ledger.
Read MoreMinnesota's eleven tribal nations aren't a subcategory of state government; they are separate sovereigns that predate the state and, in law, outrank it. They opened the first legal cannabis dispensaries two years before the state market, hold treaty rights the Supreme Court has upheld, and are getting land back. A respectful, accurate accounting.
Read MoreThe panels are fine. The financing is the scam. Federal regulators found solar 'dealer fees' of 10 to 50 percent baked invisibly into the loan, so a financed buyer pays thousands more than a cash buyer for the identical system. Minnesota already gives you a 3-day right to cancel a door-to-door solar sale. Here's how to use it.
Read MoreMinnesota has 4.6 lawyers per 1,000 people statewide — but 9.2 in the metro and 2.3 outside it, with five northern counties in true 'legal desert' territory. Meanwhile 92 percent of low-income Americans' civil legal problems get no real help. The shortage, and the recruitment model that's actually working next door.
Read MorePublic defenders represent 80 to 90 percent of everyone charged with a crime in Minnesota — the constitutional guarantee from Gideon made real. They do it about 150 attorneys short of national standards, for $20,000 less than the prosecutors across the aisle, while cases in some counties now take a year to reach a first hearing.
Read MoreThe law gives Minnesotans a right most states don't have — to demand why an algorithm decided against you, and the list of every company your data went to. But only the Attorney General can enforce it, there's no private right of action, and other states with weaker laws are bringing cases while ours stays silent.
Read MoreMost surveillance happens in the dark. Minnesota's drone law forces every department to report every flight, and the state publishes it. That transparency is a model worth defending — and it's also how we can see that a 'warrant required' law now runs on 9,080 warrantless flights a year, just as the company behind the license-plate cameras starts selling drones that launch on 911 calls.
Read MorePFAS have contaminated the drinking water of Minnesota's east metro. 3M's landmark settlement is funding the cleanup — but the state's own spending reports show the money running short, with a cost-overrun reallocation already planned. Minnesota also passed one of the strongest PFAS bans in the country. What it does, and who pays next.
Read MoreThe scary national story about public pensions mostly isn't Minnesota's story. The state's largest fund is 95% funded and climbing, the actuary uses conservative assumptions on purpose, and Minnesota is confident enough to be increasing retiree COLAs. This is what it looks like when a state fixes a problem before it becomes a crisis — with one real pressure point left to watch.
Read MoreMinnesota promised to publicly report 100 percent of its opioid-settlement spending — one of only 20 states to do so, and a real bright spot. But the receipts already show drift: money meant to save lives spent on drug dogs and a debunked fentanyl-detection device. What works, what doesn't, and why the tracking matters.
Read MoreFrom 1858 to 1993, no creditor could take a Minnesota family's homestead no matter its value — and our own Supreme Court held that was constitutional. Then a physician tried to shelter $700,000 on the eve of bankruptcy, and the Legislature capped everyone. The federal fix that makes the abuse impossible today, the economics on both sides, and why Minnesota should return to its own tradition.
Read MoreThe reliability fight over Minnesota's clean-energy mandate is louder than it is honest. The 2040 law contains a mandatory off-ramp: the PUC 'shall' delay the standard if reliability is at risk. Minnesota is already 51% carbon-free. The real question isn't the deadline — it's transmission and what happens on the coldest night of the year.
Read MoreThirty agencies searched Twin Cities suburbs' license-plate cameras for immigration enforcement. Fridley's cameras were searched 390,000 times in a month. Minnesota has one of the strongest ALPR laws in the country — and it's how we found out. The gaps, and the fix.
Read MoreIn 2021 Minnesota did the right thing and ended debt-based license suspension. But a flat $75 surcharge still lands on every conviction down to a petty misdemeanor — where it can dwarf the fine itself — and court debt as small as $25 triggers a tax-refund seizure. How the system makes being poor expensive.
Read MoreMinnesota's new privacy law makes your face 'sensitive data' a company can't use without permission. Then it exempts the government entirely. So the mall that scans you must ask; the police running facial recognition on the same face don't. The gap, the wrongful arrests, and the fix.
Read MoreData brokers hold thousands of data points on nearly every American, sort us into segments like 'Rural and Barely Making It,' and sell mental-health and military-personnel data for pennies. California built a one-button 'delete me from all of them.' Minnesota's new privacy law forgot to.
Read MoreA contract for deed can strip a family's entire investment after one missed payment — no foreclosure, no redemption, no surplus. One Minnesota seller ran that play on about 160 Muslim buyers, marketing it as 'sharia-compliant.' A jury found him liable this June. And in 2024 Minnesota finally rewrote the law.
Read MoreA federal court that covers Minnesota struck down the FTC's 'click to cancel' rule six days before it took effect. But Minnesota passed its own — and it's strong. What the law actually requires, the retention-gauntlet tactics it bans, and the one weak spot that keeps it from having teeth.
Read MoreFor years, only 5 percent of eligible Minnesotans ever cleared a record that was blocking their job and their housing — because you had to hire a lawyer and petition. Minnesota made it automatic. This is what a government program looks like when it actually delivers — and the one gap that still lets old records haunt people.
Read MoreMinnesota has the largest charitable-gambling industry in the country, and it's booming. But the state's own numbers show taxes taking a bigger slice than the charitable missions the whole thing is supposed to fund — while $200 statewide went to problem-gambling programs against $195 million in gambling tax.
Read MoreStolen wages cost American workers more than all robbery, burglary, and car theft combined. Minnesota passed one of the toughest wage theft laws in the country — and got its first conviction six years later, against a painting contractor who underpaid five workers on a publicly funded job.
Read MoreThe state projects a $377 million surplus for 2028–29 — and a $2.05 billion structural deficit for the same years. Both are official. Both are correct. Here's why, what the record surplus actually was, and the honest version of an argument both parties are half-right about.
Read MoreMnDOT beats every current pavement and bridge target — and projects the share of state highways in poor condition rising tenfold in a decade. A $15–20 billion gap, a delivery fee that raised $19.9 million, a light-rail line that went from $1.25 billion to $2.86 billion, and the safety number nobody expected.
Read MoreOne cent on the dollar. Meanwhile Minnesota now has 0.25 percent of consumers carrying medical debt in collections against a national 3.22 percent — one of the clearest policy successes in the state. Here's what actually caused it, what a federal court undid, and the honest evidence on debt relief.
Read MoreThirty-eight thousand beds became twenty-five thousand. Red Lake County has none at all. Hospitals report 195,000 patient-days a year for people who are well enough to leave and have nowhere to go — $487 million of unpaid care. And the state agency that pays for it says it does not know whether these facilities are losing money.
Read MoreTaconite production fell six million tons in a year, two plants idled, and extended unemployment expired on May 24. Meanwhile the copper-nickel fight enters its second decade. The numbers on both, and the arguments from both sides in their own words — including labor's, and a DFL senator's.
Read MoreState Farm paid a $5,000 penalty for failing to handle auto glass claims on time. Minnesota's bad-faith statute caps recovery at $250,000, can't be pleaded in the complaint, excludes health insurers entirely, and makes the state's own findings inadmissible. What the law actually gives a policyholder — and what it doesn't.
Read MoreThe workforce numbers, the $6.2 billion in taxes, what a single enforcement operation cost Lake Street businesses, and the part nobody covers: immigrant Minnesotans are among the most defrauded consumers in this state, and the law meant to protect them is barely used.
Read MoreThe class of 2026 is the peak — 67,286 seniors — and the number falls for fifteen years after. Meanwhile tuition is about to overtake state support for the first time, a free-tuition program served five times its projection, and the Legislature just repealed the requirement to measure whether it worked.
Read MoreOne or two people out of a thousand open the terms. The average sign-up contract is written above a college sophomore's reading level. And when researchers measured what disclosure actually accomplishes, the answer was $71 million a year against $11.9 billion from simply banning the fees. The receipts on America's most convenient legal fiction.
Read MoreSixteen licensed retailers. Twelve social-equity licenses out of 506 applicants. And more than 3,500 charges for cannabis in a car since legalization — under a traffic provision that appears nowhere in the cannabis act, with 42 percent of those charged in Hennepin County being Black in a county that is 13 percent Black.
Read MoreThe state's own demographers say Minnesota loses 8,800 teenagers a year — mostly to border-state colleges — while actually gaining college graduates on net. The workforce math, the honest strengths ledger, and the retention playbook that the data supports.
Read MoreOut-of-state ownership of Twin Cities rental homes went from under 3 percent to one in five. Eviction filings are running at record pace. Here's the Federal Reserve's ownership data, the University of Minnesota's eviction research, the AG enforcement docket — and the rights renters got in 2023-24 that most don't know they have.
Read MoreBusiness formation is at a record high, small firms produced 88.7 percent of Minnesota's net job growth — and swipe fees, new payroll mandates, and one-in-three empty downtown offices are squeezing the margin. Main Street economics, with both sides on the record.
Read MoreFarm income fell 88 percent in two years before a partial rebound. Minnesota lost 1,300 farms in one year. Chapter 12 bankruptcies quadrupled. And yet rural Minnesota is gaining people. The honest ledger on Greater Minnesota's economy — and what actually works.
Read MoreMurders down three straight years from the 2021 peak. Carjackings down 45 percent. Fraud offenses now outnumber all violent crime combined — with single-digit clearance rates. Minnesota public safety by the actual data, plus the strategies with proven results.
Read MoreMinnesota's 2026 levies rose $873 million — the sharpest climb since 2008 — and Minneapolis has proposed 11.3% for 2027. The documented drivers: federal cost shifts, personnel and insurance inflation, and empty office towers pushing the burden onto homeowners. Plus the relief programs most eligible Minnesotans never claim.
Read MoreThird-grade reading proficiency has fallen four years running, to 45.9 percent. One in four students is chronically absent. But Mississippi went from 49th to 9th in fourth-grade reading — and Minnesota just adopted the same playbook. The numbers, the economics, and the honest scorecard.
Read MoreWe pulled the IRS's own migration files and the Census Bureau's own population estimates. The honest answer: yes, Minnesota lost high-income households for years — and the story just changed. Here's what the numbers say, both sides of the argument, and what would actually help.
Read MoreFourteen closure or cutback hearings in under three years. Premiums up 21 percent in one year. A 20 percent claim-denial rate that fewer than 1 percent of patients appeal. What's happening to Minnesota healthcare — and the legal tools the state just started using.
Read MoreData centers wanting as much power as every Minnesota household combined are coming. Minnesota passed a first-in-the-nation ratepayer-protection law — here's what's actually in it, what the rate cases show, and the one deadline that decides whether your bill is protected.
Read MoreFBI data show reported internet-fraud losses by older Minnesotans jumped from $52 million to $111 million in a single year. Here's who's taking the money, how the scams actually work, and the protection playbook with proven results — including the crypto-ATM ban that just took effect.
Read MoreThe court-established numbers, the disputed estimates, the audit warnings that went unheeded, and the documented return on real enforcement — $4.64 back for every dollar spent. The full accounting of Minnesota's fraud crisis, sourced end to end.
Read MoreJunk fees, credit-report errors, and debt collectors chasing debts people don't owe — the everyday economics of consumer harm in Minnesota, what the federal retreat of 2025 changed, and the receipts showing that enforcement pays for itself.
Read MoreHousing, childcare, health insurance, utilities, and home and auto insurance — the documented numbers on what life in Minnesota actually costs now, and the fixes with real evidence behind them.
Read MoreEvery large fraud case eventually ends up in a courtroom. What gets less attention is everything that happened before the first search warrant was served. Minnesota's own Legislative Auditor concluded that oversight failed. Minnesotans deserve an AG who will make sure it never happens again.
Read MoreThe DFL informed Dave Madgett that he would not be permitted to enter the convention floor. Not to speak. Not to sit. Not to enter. The only candidate challenging Ellison for Attorney General was shut out while Ellison posted about "people power."
Read MoreRon Schutz is tailor-made to destroy Ellison. He is a Forbes Top 200 lawyer, a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Army JAG, and a board member of the organization that published the Feeding Our Future audio. Every priority on his website is a weapon aimed at one person.
Read MoreThe Trump administration announced another round of fraud charges in Minnesota. Fifteen more people charged. Ninety million more dollars stolen from Medicaid. Federal prosecutors now estimate that fraud in Minnesota could exceed nine billion dollars. Why did federal prosecutors have to step in?
Read MoreThe Attorney General is the People's Lawyer, and this office needs a prosecutor, not a politician. Dave Madgett on why he ran for Minnesota Attorney General in 2026.
Read MoreFrom Feeding Our Future to healthcare fraud schemes, federal prosecutors estimate fraud in Minnesota programs could exceed $9 billion. The AG's office was supposed to be the last line of defense. What went wrong?
Read MoreAfter nearly two decades helping Minnesotans fight identity theft, predatory lending, and consumer fraud, Dave Madgett knows these cases inside and out. He will bring that experience to the AG's office on day one.
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