Addressing Minnesota’s Lack of Affordability
by Senator Jason Rarick

For a long time, I’ve heard one resounding complaint from folks across the state and in our district: Minnesota families are tired of how unaffordable things have gotten. It seems like every time families turn around, there’s a new tax, a higher tax, or prices going up. It’s getting burdensome for many. That’s why Senate Republicans are making a strong push for affordability measures in Minnesota. There are many ways we can achieve this, but there are 3 key areas our plan focuses on: lowering property taxes, eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, and reducing the cost of tab fees. These are basic, commonsense proposals.

The first area where we can address affordability? Property taxes. We’ve seen the drastic increase in numbers; we’ve heard from families who are shocked at the massive increases they’ve seen – some have even seen large increases back-to-back. It’s so bad, it’s pricing many out of their homes. It’s also making first-time homeownership far more unattainable for many. In fact, back in 2020, the average age of a firs time homebuyer was 33, now in 2026, it’s up to 40. Increasing property taxes play a big role in that.

To address this, our plan takes a two-fold approach: capping property taxes and ending unfunded mandates. Our plan proposes capping property taxes at the rate of inflation plus 50% for the population growth for cities and counties over 2,500 residents. There is still a caveat for rates to be increased, but only by allowing it to be done through the ballot box. This is one step, but the real solution is getting the state out of the way of counties, cities, and schools, and to stop pushing unfunded mandates on them. All of these mandates are telling these entities what they have to provide without funding to support it – that’s what’s driving up your property taxes. By implementing both of these measures, we sure could save families a lot of money.

Another critical move is to end taxes on tips and overtime. This would follow President Trump’s plan and would bring our state into conformity with the federal tax code. While both are good, I want to specifically focus on overtime. We’ve been hearing from employers across the state – they are struggling to get new workers, they’re short on workers, and people do not work as many hours as they used to. No tax on overtime would be a great way to incentivize folks to work extra hours to meet requirements and timelines that employers may have on specific projects, while making extra income to help pay their bills.

The last part of our plan focuses on tab fees, which is easily one of the top issues I hear about every day. Many drivers in our area reach out to me every day, lamenting over the fact that they bought a car a few years ago, and now their tab fees are hundreds of dollars. In fact, it’s not unheard of for some drivers to be paying over $700 to register their vehicle every year. The average five-year total for registering a new car in Minnesota is about $3,520, and that makes our state a massive outlier compared to other Midwest states. Over that same amount of time, you’d pay $465 in North Dakota and $378 in South Dakota. That is a stark difference. Make no mistake, the reason our tab fees are so excessively high is because of what was passed by the Democrat trifecta in 2023 and 2024. It’s led to sticker shock for drivers across the state. The worst part is that many people cannot opt out of driving. So these higher fees are making it so that the only “option” would be to purchase another older car, which would also take significant money to maintain. This is not feasible. We need to undo changes made throughout the last few years.

We’re paying more for our car tabs, gas tax, property taxes, delivery taxes…. The list goes on. The current status quo is not a sustainable reality for families in our state – we need to prioritize affordability. Our plan does just that: prioritizes commonsense solutions to make life affordable for Minnesotans.