LABOR

Monica Byron

Education Minnesota, a statewide labor union representing educators, announced that Monica Byron has been elected president, succeeding Denise Specht, who did not seek reelection. Byron, currently vice president, ran unopposed. Also elected were Marty Fridgen of South Washington County as vice president and Ryan Fiereck of St. Francis as secretary-treasurer. Byron has taught for 24 years in Richfield Public Schools, most recently working as an elementary math coach. The new leadership team takes office July 1.

ADVERTISING/PUBLIC RELATIONS

Goff Public, a St. Paul-based public relations and lobbying firm, announced that Jake Ricker is joining its team as a vice president of public relations, and that Elizabeth Emerson, a principal of the company, was promoted to senior vice president of public affairs. Ricker most recently served as the senior public relations director at the University of Minnesota; Emerson has led a bipartisan public affairs team of Goff Public at the state Capitol since 2012.

EDUCATION

BestPrep, a Brooklyn Park-based nonprofit business and financial education program for grades 4-12, announced Jason Sanders as chief executive officer. Sanders previously was with the Dodge Nature Center in St. Paul, where he served as executive director. He succeeds Bob Kaitz, who announced his retirement after nearly 50 years with the organization.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

U.S. Bancorp, Minneapolis-based parent company of U.S. Bank, announced that Adam Graves has been promoted to senior executive vice president and head of enterprise strategy and administration, and member of the company’s managing committee. Graves previously was head of strategy and corporate development since 2023. … Baird, an international employee-owned wealth management and private equity firm, announced that it has added Mark L. Brenna as a director and financial adviser to its wealth management office in Minnetonka. Brenna previously was with RBC Capital, where he managed $336 million in assets.

HONORS

The U.S. Small Business Administration announced it has named Paul Kirkman, of Victual in Crosby, Minn., as its Minnesota Encore Entrepreneur of the Year. Victual is specialty goods store featuring house-made ice cream, artisan cheeses, charcuterie, gourmet packaged foods, specialty wines and spirits and gifts. … Minnesota Brownfields, an organization devoted to the cleanup and reuse of contaminated lands, announced the recipients of its 2025 ReScape Awards: Community Impact: Small Project Winner: Bimosedaa, Minneapolis; Community Impact: Large Project Winner: Minneapolis American Indian Center; Economic Award Winner: Hatchery Row, Battle Lake; Environmental Award: Settlers East, Woodbury; Innovation Award Winner: Soul, St. Paul.

LAW

The Minnesota Judicial Branch announced the following members to the new State Board of Civil Legal Aid, which was created to ensure advocacy for persons unable to afford private counsel: Minnesota Supreme Court appointees: Emily Cooper, Katy Drahos, Jeremy Lane, John Murphy and Suumra Shariff, Christopher Wendt; governor’s appointees: Tarryl Clark, John Gordon, Holley Horrell, Anna Pottratz Acosta and Korey Wahwassuck. … Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, St. Paul, announced the following staff appointments: Elizabeth Due and Azure Schermerhorn-Snyder, staff attorneys; Najat Haji, social worker; Zoe Martens, outreach coordinator; Betsy Froiland, paralegal, and the pending retirement of CEO Jessie Nicholson on July 31. … Gilbert Mediation Center, an Eden Prairie-based legal dispute resolution firm, announced it has added the Hon. Shawn M. Bartsh (Ret.) to its mediation team. Bartsh previously served as a District Court Judge for Ramsey County and is a past president of the Ramsey County Bar Association. … Hinshaw & Culbertson, Minneapolis, announced that Peter J. Kaiser has joined the firm as a partner in the Commercial Transactions Practice Group. Kaiser previously was with Moss & Barnett, where he was a shareholder. … National law firm Spencer Fane announced Troy J. Dobbs has joined the firm’s Minneapolis office as an associate in the Tax, Trusts, & Estates practice group. Dobbs earned his juris doctor from the University of St. Thomas School of Law, where he served as a student practitioner for a local law firm’s Bankruptcy Litigation Clinic; he also worked as a law librarian for the Honorable Walter Kaminsky of the Tenth Judicial District in Minnesota.

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EMAIL ITEMS to businessnews@pioneerpress.com.

By SARAH RAZA and ERIC TUCKER

The FBI has identified a 25-year-old California man as the person they say is responsible for the explosion of a Palm Springs fertility clinic.

Authorities say the suspect, Guy Edward Bartkus of Twentynine Palms, is the same person who was found near a charred-out vehicle by the clinic.

Akil Davis, the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said during a Sunday news conference that investigators were reviewing writings left behind by Bartkus that could shed light on his state of mind. His writings were “anti pro-life” in nature, according to a social media post Sunday from Bilal Essayli, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. The Associated Press reported Saturday night that those writings communicated a belief that the world should not be populated.

“The subject had nihilistic ideations and this was a targeted attack against the IVF facility,” Davis said. “Make no mistake: we are treating this, as I said yesterday, as an intentional act of terrorism.”

The bombing injured four other people in addition to killing Bartkus, though Davis said all embryos at the facility were saved.

“Good guys one, bad guys zero,” he said.

Saturday’s explosion is “probably the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California,” Davis added. Authorities were executing a search warrant in Twentynine Palms as part of the investigation.

The suspect posted writings online and attempted to record the explosion, though authorities said the video failed to upload. An official who was not authorized to discuss details of the attack spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

The blast gutted the single-story American Reproductive Centers clinic in upscale Palm Springs, though a doctor told the Associated Press its staff members were safe.

“Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients,” Dr. Maher Abdallah, who leads the clinic, told the AP in a phone interview.

Edward Lotterman

The 119th Congress now deliberating in Washington is rewriting history. Having sat for only 135 days, but already over seven months into fiscal year 2025, it will grab the prize as most fiscally irresponsible Congress ever.

The 12th Congress, 1811-1813, held that status for two centuries. It declared war on England in June 1812 and adjourned without appropriating any money with which to fight. This was after refusing to recharter the First Bank of the United States, the best vehicle by which we might have borrowed the money.

We are not in a declared war now, thank God, yet there are conflicts at multiple points around the world. Our armed forces conduct combat operations daily. More importantly, the world economy is in peril amidst a trade war of our own making.

So what has this Congress done? Seven months and two weeks into the current fiscal year, Congress should be well into the task of writing the budget for FY 2026. That starts in 136 days. But it cannot quite finish a 2025 budget that will pass both houses and be signed by our president.

The general outline is clear, however. Total outlays will be up from FY 2024. Elon Musk’s delusional promises to reduce spending by $2 trillion have actually cut less than $100 billion. And some cuts were from necessary programs like air traffic control and income tax administration that will be restored. And in any case, DOGE’s cuts will be overwhelmed by higher outlays from the number of Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries ratcheting up by 1.5 million. Everyone knew this would happen.

Yet Congress proposes to cut taxes by about $90 billion a year compared to what they would be with no change in current policy. All this is madness.

The root cause of the trade deficits that trouble those in the administration is that Americans consume more than we produce. The fiscal deficit — our government paying out more than it takes in — is one underlying cause of perennial trade deficits that some see as evidence of our being cheated.

But that is a broader matter. What about details of what Congress is poised to do?

First, the 2017 tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited high income people will be made permanent. This is obscene in its lack of fairness.

University of Chicago economist Raghuram G. Rajan pointed out 15 years ago that “The top 1 percent of households accounted for only 8.9 percent of income in 1976, but this share grew to 23.5 percent of the total income generated in the United States in 2007. Put differently, of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 percent of households.”

Those trends have continued. Forty years ago, our nation was in the fifth of nations with the most equal income distribution. Now we are in the fifth with the most unequal. Yes, high income households do pay a large fraction of total personal income taxes. But that is because they get such a large and growing fraction of total income. Yet the cuts they got eight years ago will continue.

So will the “carried interest” treatment for much of the compensation of hedge fund managers that results in their facing lower marginal tax rates than most school teachers or many truck drivers. This injustice has begged for correction for 30 years, but donations to inaugural balls and purchases of Donald and Melania’s crypto coins along with PAC contributions to key congressional races were investments that paid off handsomely to put it mildly.

Also, no one will pay income taxes on any Social Security benefits. That upends a bi-partisan consensus carefully crafted in 1984 to eliminate an unfair disparity between the taxation of public and private pension plans on one side with zero taxation of the fraction of Social Security paid for by employers’ share of FICA. It also served to keep Social Security funding solvent longer without further increases in FICA rates.

But responsible bi-partisan crafting when Congress still functioned cannot resist demagogues. And so, a fraction of us who are relatively well off will pay less in taxes. Our children and grandchildren will pay more.

The elimination of taxes on tip income will help some of them, although fewer than 2% of U.S. workers get tips and considerable fudging remains on the fraction still paid in cash. I

Hourly workers will not be taxed on overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed late in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1938, requires wages at least one and a half times as high for any hours over 40 a week. All this was ordinary income subject to the individual income tax. But now only pay for the first 40 hours a week will get hit.

There is some apparent fairness in these two measures. If you’re giving many billions to millionaires, give at least a couple of billions to wait staff, truck drivers and assembly-line and warehouse workers.

The problem is that in doing so, you introduce other incentives that skew efficient use of resources as people try to milk the new tax preference for all they can.

Lower tax rates on capital gains than on salaries created the sham of hedge fund managers being compensated with “carried interest.” Decades earlier, a lower tax rate on sales of “livestock held for breeding purposes,” meant that female pigs raised for slaughter would be bred to give one litter of baby pigs before being sent to packing plants, while these sows’ male littermates were sent as soon as fat for slaughter.

Such tax-reducing fiddling wastes resources. They only make sense to people doing them because of the tax code quirks. This year’s tax changes create large incentives for more of the shame — er, same.

Hospitality owners already try to shift compensation from wages toward “tips.” One can already read how that might get extended to other sectors.

Brazil once had a similar experiment with tax-free overtime. Workers who regularly had been working 40 hours a week started to clock 32 one week, 48 the next and so on. Total hours worked didn’t change, but fiddled timecards meant 10% to15% of pay was not taxed.

Could major employers here get away with this? Probably not. What about small construction, office cleaning, independent retail and similar firms? Don’t bet against it. Yet over-the-road truckers earning by the mile or others on piecework won’t benefit a cent.

Public finance economists evaluate the “burden” of taxes. This includes the total cost to society of the taxes actually paid to the government plus the administrative costs of complying with the tax. It also includes the losses in national output caused by inefficient use of resources motivated only by tax avoidance. Breeding young sows to have one litter of pigs to lower income tax liability took more real resources of feed, labor and facilities per pound of pork available to households.

Congress’s 2025 actions make our economy less efficient, less fair, and less sustainable than it was on Jan. 1. It already was shot through with problems then. Why do we accept going backwards?

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

NEW YORK (AP) — A Mexican navy sailing ship on a global goodwill tour struck the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, snapping its three masts, killing two crew members and leaving some sailors dangling from harnesses high in the air waiting for help. Mayor Eric Adams says at least 19 people aboard the ship needed medical treatment Saturday night. But he says the 142-year-old bridge has been spared major damage. The cause of the collision is under investigation. The Mexican navy says in a post on the social media platform X that the incident involves the Cuauhtemoc, an academy training vessel.