”Clearly, it’s irresponsible to run back the same tax cuts after the deficit has tripled,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Republican congressional aide. ”Even congressional Republicans behind the scenes are looking for ways to scale down the president’s ambitions.”

Democrats and many economists say Trump’s income tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy, which deprives the government of revenues needed for programs for the middle class and poor.

“The president-elect’s tax policy ideas will increase the deficit because they will decrease taxes for those with the highest ability to pay, such as the corporations whose tax rate he’s proposed reducing even further to 15%,” said Jessica Fulton, vice president of policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that deals with issues facing communities of color.

Trump’s team insists he can make the math work.

”The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail, including lowering prices. He will deliver,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump transition spokeswoman.

When Trump was last in the White House in 2020, the federal government was spending $345 billion annually to service the national debt. It was possible to run up the national debt with tax cuts and pandemic aid because the average interest rate was low, such that repayment costs were manageable even as debt levels climbed.

As harried commuters arrived on the Northstar Commuter Rail platform in Minneapolis last week, Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle and other Metro Transit employees met them, bearing cookies and words of thanks.

The celebratory sweets marked Northstar’s 15th birthday this month, a quiet milestone for rail service between Target Field and Big Lake that has struggled for relevance from the very beginning, especially after a precipitous decline in ridership during the pandemic.

The big question forever dogging Northstar is whether the line will ever connect to St. Cloud, as originally planned more than 15 years ago.

The current answer? No one knows. And, unlike previous years, there doesn’t appear to be any groundswell of support bubbling up at the moment to make the final 28-mile connection between Big Lake and St. Cloud a reality.

“Northstar has never lived up to its aspirations,” said Zelle, who, as the head of the Met Council, oversees transportation planning in the metro.

While Northstar has been successfully ferrying suburban Minnesota Twins and Vikings fans downtown on game days, Zelle said daily commuter service “falls into the challenges of express routes in general.”

With the rise of hybrid work during the pandemic and pronounced shifts in the way people commute to work, Northstar provides three southbound trips and one northbound trip each weekday morning, and three northbound trips and one southbound trip on weekday afternoons. No weekend service is available, except for special events.

For now, Metro Transit’s proposed operating budget preserves current service on Northstar. Whether that will change is unclear.

A group of 10 nonprofits that oversee almost all of the publicly funded charter schools in Minnesota refuses to turn over documents showing how they handle contract violations by the schools they supervise, arguing that they are private organizations not subject to the state law requiring disclosure of all public records.

The Minnesota Star Tribune filed requests for the records in early November as part of the newspaper’s ongoing investigation of Minnesota’s troubled charter school sector. The Star Tribune published a three-part series detailing oversight problems and widespread failures among Minnesota’s charter schools in September.

So far this year, nine of the 181 charters schools operating in the state at the beginning of 2024 have closed — the most since the first charter school failure in 1996, state records show.

At least one more charter school, STEP Academy — which has campuses in St. Paul and Burnsville and is one of Minnesota’s largest charter schools — has been threatened with the termination of its contract. It was repeatedly cited for contract violations by Innovative Quality Schools (IQS), the nonprofit that oversees the school on behalf of the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).

To find out if other charter schools are on the brink of collapse, the Star Tribune asked all 12 of the state’s authorizers for letters sent to schools this year documenting concerns over failing academics, financial instability or other issues that could jeopardize a school’s ability to remain open.

The documents are not available from MDE because the department does not routinely require authorizers to provide such records, MDE officials said in a previous interview.

The only authorizers that complied with the Star Tribune’s request are two public school districts that oversee three charter schools. One of those schools, TRIO Wolf Creek Distance Learning Charter School in Chisago City, received a warning letter in June that outlined three concerns, including the school’s failure to meet various “equity and inclusion” goals. The school’s authorizer, Chisago Lakes School District, accepted the school’s corrective action plan in September.

Though private organizations typically are exempt from the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, that exemption is lifted when nonprofits enter into agreements with the government to carry out some of its functions, such as regulating a large portion of the state’s public school sector, said the Star Tribune’s attorney, Leita Walker.