I’m not from Minnesota, so I’m just going to say it: Shame on Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Enough is enough with the “no new taxes” baloney. This is a serious time, in Minnesota and in the United States. We’re facing a broken economy nationally and have to deal with a historic $5.2 billion deficit in this state, so let’s stop with the politically expedient nonsense.

Nothing should be off the table as the GOP governor and DFL legislative leaders hammer out solutions to this fiscal crisis.

Sure, that “no new taxes” phrase has served Pawlenty in a political way, done a good job of helping him build a political base among conservatives here and across the country – conservatives who’ve been conditioned to believe “taxes’ is a dirty word (a conditioning Democrats have done little to counteract).

That pledge helped Pawlenty almost become the GOP’s vice presidential candidate this year, and it continues to help him burnish his national credentials.

Hey, I have no problem with an ambitious and smart person like Pawlenty – who gives a good speech and looks good doing it – trying to go far in politics and the world. He’s worked hard, he deserves it.

But it’s time for the governor to put the state and its people before his career. Yesterday, he talked as he usually does about how raising taxes would add to the “burden on Minnesotans.”

What about the burden placed on Minnesotans by drastic budget cuts that dramatically reduce services across the state? That’s a burden all of us feel every day, in multiple ways.

The governor singled out health care, as he usually does (and which took the worst of it in the drastic 2003 cuts). I’m wondering whether he and his people understand the reality of drastic cuts in health that are supposed to save money. They don’t, not in the long term.

Sure, slashing health care might work in the short term, in helping a governor balance a budget, but when legions of people who’ve lost health care start showing up in emergency rooms at hospitals for problems that could have been avoided with routine care, the costs of care skyrockets.

It’s the proverbial deal with the devil. And it does a disservice to Minnesotans by really adding to their burden.

Speaking of Minnesotans, isn’t the governor aware that folks here and across the nation just elected a president who promised to raise taxes on the wealthiest in the country – an astonishing promise in this culture?

And more, that as election data show (and as Capitol Report columnist Dane Smith eloquently pointed out in these pages last week), the wealthiest in this country voted for the man who promised to raise their taxes in basically the same numbers as they voted for the man who didn’t?

Besides, the majority of Minnesotans are not anti-tax people, as we’ve shown once again and most recently by passing the constitutional amendment for the environment and the arts.

Perhaps Pawlenty should look at what’s going on around him – as good politicians should always do – and realize that his old, bankrupt promise, while it may play to the rock-solid base that will always be there for him, doesn’t reflect the feelings of the majority of people in his state.

And let me go further by pointing out the real white elephant occupying the room built by the governor’s “no-new-taxes” pledge: It’s neither accurate nor true.

It’s never been true that Pawlenty won’t raise taxes – it’s basically impossible not to – and it ain’t true now. It certainly won’t be true in six months.

Recall Pawlenty’s infamous tobacco health impact “fees” in 2005. Does anyone really believe those aren’t taxes?

Bottom line: Taxes or fees, or whatever euphemism you might want to use, have been raised repeatedly in the last six years, whether the governor wants to take responsibility or not, because taxes provide a good chunk of the money that makes government work. That’s just how our system is set up.

Don’t most people realize, as the governor does, that just a modest income tax increase on the wealthiest Minnesotans would wipe out nearly half the deficit?

My God, why would a person, even a politician, tie himself up in knots attempting to continue to keep alive an image that only benefits himself (and the people who work most closely with him), especially when the majority of people in the state he supposedly leads don’t subscribe to that image?

And it leads to an increased burden for the people in his state?

Someone should ask Tim Pawlenty those questions.