Seemed like such an ordinary day.trusty_getto-Ordinary_Day
Snyder’s budget is such a colossal piece of trash, he’s now hitting the lecture circuit to try and “sell” it to his supporters. Yep, you heard that right. This budget is so bad, his supporters need to be “sold” on it.
This is what Michigan gets for voting in a millionaire businessman. He wants to do what businesses do. He wants to make big cuts now, with the hope that a few tough years now will bear fruit in the long run. Trouble is, government is not like a business. Citizens are not employees. When you are down on revenue, you don’t get to liquidate a division or stop providing a service. You can’t. You have constitutional responsibilities to run your government.
One of the dumbest “sacrifices” that Snyder wants to make is to further defund public education. Kids can’t vote, so he doesn’t have to worry about the children being pissed at him. There’s just one tiny, little problem with this plan. Children need an education now, not when the economy improves. Will all the kids that don’t get an education now because of all the teacher layoffs have a chance to come back and do this over when they can’t get into college? I wonder what Snyder’s plan is to deal with all the schools that are going to fail because his administration can’t come up with enough money to maintain the status quo. I thought he said education was essential to keeping young people in Michigan and creating jobs. So the solution is to spend less on education? What moron thought that up?
He wants seniors to sacrifice by paying more in taxes. This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a great while. After working hard making sacrifices for their families their entire lives and reaching the point where they can enjoy their golden years, Snyder wants them to pay more? What an asshole for even saying this out loud.
He wants poor people to give up the earned income tax credit. This is a tiny, paltry tax credit that doesn’t cost the state much and means a great deal to people who have very little. If we are stooping so low as to balance the budget by eliminating this meager tax credit, increasing taxes on old people, and further eroding our children’s education, then maybe it’s time to throw in the towel and simply disband the state. The UP can join Wisconsin, the west half can join Indiana, and the eastern half can join Ohio. We don’t deserve to govern ourselves if this is anywhere near close to the best we can do.
Although he’s willing to raise taxes on the poor (they’re not going to vote for him anyway), he won’t cut Medicaid payments to doctors. I guess successful doctors shouldn’t have to make the same sacrifices that children, old people and the poor have to make. I probably should have gone to medical school.
Snyder has pulled the most fabulous bait and switch I think I’ve ever seen. He talked the politics of solving problems and sharing sacrifices. Only he isn’t making any sacrifice at all, and his key political constuencies aren’t sharing any sacrifice at all, either. He’s still living in his Ann Arbor mansion, still racking up investment income from his massive earnings from before he became governor. His doctor friends don’t have to take pay cuts from their government slush funds. His business friends are getting tax cuts. All the while, he’s breaking unions, laying off teachers, raising taxes on the poor, and otherwise balancing the budget on the backs of the vulnerable. He’s also eliminating revenue sharing for municipalities, which will drive even more of them over the edge. He’s pushing school districts out of deficit spending and into bankruptcy.
Most importantly, he is refusing to raise any revenue at all. He wants to cut business taxes, but he doesn’t have a plan to replace the revenue that will be lost. If you think this round of cuts is big, wait until next year. If this budget is adopted, business taxes will be cut by then, property taxes will continue going down, income taxes will keep going down, and there will be even less money than there is now.
Snyder isn’t balancing the budget. There’s no balance whatsoever to what he’s doing. He’s simply cutting spending to match diminishing revenue while making no attempt to balance anything. And he’s asking old people, poor people, and children to make sacrifices, while offering benefits to rich people and businesses by lowering their taxes.
Governor Snyder’s budget is a disgrace for Michigan. He should be embarrassed to have proposed it.
Governor Snyder, who remained mostly mute about the details of his plans to govern Michigan during his campaign, revealed on Friday that he is just as clueless as the rest of the Republican party about how to solve the state’s problems. In a speech to the Municipal League, he “challenged” cities to come up with “innovative” ways to save money and share ideas.
Hmmm. What a great idea! Save money! Innovate! Why didn’t I think of that? It seems so simple.
In a related development, Snyder also supports rolling back consumer protections so that retailers can avoid letting customers know how much the stuff for sale costs until after they’ve waited in line to purchase it. The rationale behind this plan is that retailers will save money, and pass those savings along to consumers in the form of lower prices. And if you believe that, I’ve got a gold Rolex right here that I’ll sell you for just $79.00.
Of course, consumers are against changing this law, because it obviously keeps retailers honest and most shoppers don’t want to have the burden of figuring out the cost of a purchase shifted to them. Most people think it ought to be the store’s job to make pricing clear to shoppers, but anyone who does any shopping knows that even with this important law in effect, it can be a real challenge to figure out what something costs at a great many retailers throughout Michigan.
This is a shame. Here we had an opportunity for a real change, but what we got is more of the same. I had some hopes that Snyder would govern differently than his Republican predecessor. However, it appears that Snyder isn’t really interested in what the people of Michigan want. He appears far more interested in helping his buddies who run businesses make as much money as possible while rolling back even more consumer protection legislation than Engler could back when he was in charge.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
I vaguely recall, way back in the 90s, some guy named Clinton trying very, very hard to reform our broken health care insurance system. Though it’s all a little hazy, there seemed to be some silly concern about legacy costs, the increasing cost of health insurance, the fact that it was primarily funded by employers, and that continuing with that model would result in making America less competitive.
I also have some sketchy memory of Republicans taking over Congress shortly after rejecting and ridiculing this attempt to make America more competitive.
While Republicans were in control of Congress for the next decade, I can’t seem to remember any of them doing anything at all to fix what everybody agreed then and agrees now is a broken health care insurance system that makes America less competitive than it ought to be. All the while, these self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” voted to run up the largest deficit in American history, while trying to blame it on Obama (see conservative Cato Institute post entitled “Don’t Blame Obama for Bush’s 2009 Deficit”). And I recall that a couple of years ago, due in part to continuing difficulties associated with failing to reform health care, the entire economy imploded, causing banks to fail, major corporations and car companies to file bankruptcy and millions of Americans to lose their employer-funded health insurance.
Obama, who many Republicans still incredibly think is a Muslim and not an American citizen, then took it upon himself to actually try for the first time in 15 years to tackle this problem. Instead of participating in the dialogue, Republicans scoffed at the attempt and did everything within their power to stop what amounted to the first actual attempt to solve this costly problem in over ten years. Instead of making the bill better and trying to solve the problem, they put their own political interest before the American people’s interests and used it to get votes in the next election, which worked.
So after Republicans did nothing for more than ten years, and after the Democrats enacted a bill that Republicans refused to participate in drafting, these same Republicans now want to repeal it? Even though they have disclosed no details of any plan at all to deal with the problems it solves?
What a bunch of jackasses. I don’t know who is worse — the morons in Congress pursuing a repeal or the voters who were naive enough to vote for them. Five years ago, I wrote a post entitled: You get who you vote for. Then as now, we got who we voted for. Instead of voting for representatives who are interested in solving problems, Americans voted for so-called “fiscal conservatives” who intend to neglect our problems and allow them to get worse while claiming that we are too poor a country to afford to solve them.
David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, says:
Economists believe the economy can grow forever. Not only do they believe it can grow forever, which it cannot, they believe it must grow forever. Since World War II they have equated economic growth with progress. Nobody wants to stop progress but, if economic growth is what we define as progress, who is ever going to ask what an economy is for? With all this growth are we happier? How much is enough? We do not ask those questions. We have fallen into the trap of believing that economic growth forever is possible and necessary.
I am going to show you why this is absolutely suicidal. Anything growing steadily over time is called exponential growth and whatever is growing exponentially has a predictable doubling time, whether it is the amount of garbage you make, the number of taxis on the road, the amount of water you use, or the human population. So, if the population is growing at 1% a year it will double in 70 years; 2% a year it will double in 35 years; 3% – 23 years; 4% in 17.5 years. Anything growing exponentially will double predictably.
I am going to show you why it is suicidal to think we can keep growing forever. Let me give you a test tube full of food for bacteria, that represents our world. I am going to put one bacterial cell into that test tube (representing us), and it is going to divide every minute; that is exponential growth. So at time zero you have one cell; one minute you have two; two minutes you have four; three minutes you have eight; four minutes you have 16. That is exponential growth and at 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left, a sixty minute cycle.
When is the test tube only half full? Well the answer of course is at 59 minutes; but a minute later it is filled. So at 58 minutes it is 25% full; 57 minutes 12½ % full. At 55 minutes of the 60 minute cycle it is only 3% full. So, if at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said to its companions that they had a population problem, the other bacteria would be incredulous because 97% of the test tube would be empty and they had been around for 55 minutes. Yet they would have only 5 minutes left. So bacteria are no smarter than humans and at 59 minutes they realize they only have a minute left. So they give massive amounts of money to scientists, and in less than a minute those bacterial scientists invent three test tubes full of food. That would be like adding three more planets for our use. So it would seem that they (and we) would be saved.
What actually happens is this – at 60 minutes the first tube is full; at 61 minutes the second is full; and at 62 minutes all four are full. By quadrupling the amount of food and space, you buy two extra minutes! How do we add even a fraction of 1% more of air, water, soil or biodiversity? We cannot. The biosphere is fixed and finite and every biologist I have talked to agrees with me, we are past the 59th minute. So all those leaders saying that we have to keep the economy growing are saying we have to accelerate down what is a suicidal path.
Something worth thinking about anyway.
Excerpted from the Climate Change Corporation’s website.
I
think I may have started and failed to finish more blog posts in the last several months than I wrote in the entire prior year.
It’s not that I don’t have anything to write. I just don’t seem to have any time to write anything, edit it, and then get it posted.
Sure, I could stop playing Farmville, which would probably free up some time, but that would involve sacrificing a bona fide obsession, and that just wouldn’t be right.
John Kerfoot, a resident of St. Clair Shores, has come up with several parodies of the Pure Michigan campaign. And they are hilarious! Don’t miss ‘em. (Warning: NSFW).
