Photo by Deb Gau Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, at left, listens to Jim Swenson explain part of the Action Manufacturing facility during a tour on Monday afternoon

MARSHALL — The timing was “absolutely right” for Minnesota to have some important talks about reducing spending and taxes, Scott Jensen said Monday.

While the Republican gubernatorial candidate didn’t have specific proposals on where the state could reduce spending in order to phase out personal income taxes, he said it would be important to try.

“I think we should say this is the time to have the big conversation,” Jensen said. “Could Minnesota become one of those 20% of states in the nation that don’t have a personal income tax? If we could, would that charge us forward to becoming that economic hub of the Midwest? I think both questions are reasonable to ask.”

Jensen made a stop in Marshall on Monday afternoon. He toured the facilities at Action Manufacturing, spoke to local media, and later held a meet-and-greet event that drew a crowd to the Action Manufacturing lobby.

Jensen said now, while Minnesota had a $10-$12 billion surplus, was a good time to try to phase out income tax. He outlined a plan to do so over the course of eight years.

“We’ve done a lot of spreadsheet studying over the last six to eight weeks. I met with John Phelan from the Center For the American Experiment,” Jensen said. “The first step would be, reduce our spending by 10%, which would basically go back to 2019, which would put our general fund budget at $47 billion instead of $52 billion.”

Jensen said the 10% spending cut would last four years, and the state could also make use of surplus funds during that time.

“We basically take 10% off, and the next three years we’d cap, and we’d use the surplus to backfill, and at four years, in 2027, we would have reduced each one of our income tax brackets by 50%,” he said. “Then we would press pause and ask ourselves, ‘Can we get the rest of the way or not?'”

While Jensen said he thought the time was right to talk about phasing out income tax in Minnesota, he said he was not calling for sales taxes to increase.

“I don’t think we’re advocating at all for a sales tax increase. I think you could ask, what do we tax now and what don’t we tax?” Jensen said. “It’s conceivable that you could say, ‘Well, we’re going to tax luxury vehicles.’ … But there’s all kinds of permutations. Again, as soon as a political candidate mentions that, usually the headline is ‘Jensen’s advocating for a luxury tax increase’ or something like that. And that keeps us from having the kinds of conversations I would hope that we could have.”

Jensen said he didn’t know if it would be possible to replace income tax revenues. “But I know that if we don’t try, we’ll never know,” he said. Jensen said that the issue would have to be broken down and analyzed further.

“There may be in some situations, potential revenue streams that might not have been recognized,” he said. For example, states like Florida and Nevada get revenue from tourism, he said. “The bottom line, is, in Minnesota we do have this sort of bright shiny object out there that we could tap into, and that would be mining. That would be nickel, cadmium and copper, and we have some of the richest stores in the entire world.”

Jensen said he would not eliminate needed services. But at the same time, he said Minnesota would have to look at where spending was going in areas like education.

“Arguably, if you look at what we spend in K-12 education, the money is not making its way to the classroom,” he said. “If you look at the graph, where the exponential growth is, in terms of education spending, is administrative costs.”

Jensen also spoke about the need to make Minnesota a more business-friendly place to compete with neighboring states.

Jensen said Minnesota needed to “Make life more attractive — Get more employees here, make it so companies want to come here, reduce regulations, reduce corporate taxes, change the culture in which we’re asking corporations to do business.”

“Right now it feels hostile,” Jensen said. “When you’ve got to fight your way through the MPCA, the DNR, every step of the way, it feels like you’re walking in cement boots. Who the hell wants to do business here?”

In remarks to the public at the meet-and-greet event, Jensen spoke briefly on issues ranging from the need to support business and industry in Minnesota, to public safety.

“When it comes to safety, it isn’t just crime in Minneapolis that matters, but certainly that’s the hotspot,” he said. “We’re seeing it across the entire state, we’re seeing it in communities of 10,000 people, and part of the reason is because there’s a certain culture of lawlessness.”

Jensen said there needed to be more police on the streets in Minneapolis, as well as other responses.

“We need to have a restorative justice program. Incarceration has to be used as a deterrent to stop recurrent violent felons from doing what they do. And we know that mandated minimum sentences have to mean that — a mandated minimum sentence,” he said.

Jensen said in his New Ulm stop that he believes the electoral college did its job, certifying the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden.

Jensen said he would “tighten up” mail in ballots to eliminate possible glitches.