Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

The education achievement gap in Minnesota is a real and persistent problem. For example, the 2016 graduation rate among black students was 22 percent below that of white students, while the rate among American Indian students was 35.5 percent below. While the gap in...

Women’s Health and Abortion in Minnesota

We recently started a series of articles to explain health care jargon and contextualize the information so all Minnesotans can engage in the broader discussion about health care. The previous article in the series described the history of health insurance in the...

Income Inequality, Tax Regressivity are Worse Than We Thought

There has long been convincing evidence—both at the state and national levels—that income inequality has accelerated in recent decades, with an increasing share of wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Extreme income inequality—coupled with stagnant or...

Minnesota Population Growth Through 2050

No one knows what the future will bring, but the experts at the Minnesota State Demographic Center have made some informed predictions as to where Minnesota population growth—and decline—will be occurring over the next several decades. To some extent, projected...

A Brief History of Insurance

Last week, we started a series of articles to explain health care jargon and contextualize the information so all Minnesotans can engage in the discussion. The first article in the series covered health centers that cover Minnesotans who need care the most. The...

School Aid: Halfway Back to 2003

Over the last fifteen years, trends in state aid to Minnesota school districts can be framed as a tale of two time periods: from fiscal year (FY) 2003 to 2012, real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) per pupil state aid to Minnesota school districts fell sharply; since FY...

Township Population Loss, Core City Resurgence

The pace of Minnesota’s population growth has changed over time and the geographical distribution of the state’s population has shifted, based on an analysis of county-level data presented in the first part of this series. An examination of county data, however, can...

Uneven Population Growth Since Mid-Century

Minnesota’s population has increased by 2.5 million people (85 percent) since the middle of last century, but the rate of that growth has been unevenly spread geographically and over time. The following analysis provides a description of Minnesota’s population change...

Undocumented Immigrants as Taxpayers

Undocumented immigrants in the United States have long been a hot political topic. The vast majority of these immigrants are not “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists,” but instead are “integral to the nation’s economic growth” and have little to no negative impact on...

Get to Know the Safety Net: Health Centers

We at the North Star Policy Institute strive to provide quality and thorough analyses of major policy conversations. In today’s contentious health care environment, policy changes, proposals, and critiques quickly flood the conversation, and they can turn into...