I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
An editorial in the Detroit News points out the obvious about the budget deal just reached between Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R) and House Speaker Andy Dillon (D), that it is just another temporary bandaid that intentionally avoids doing anything to solve the state’s fiscal problems. The editorial board writes:
The good news is that lawmakers and Gov. Jennifer Granholm have a budget deal and won’t be shutting down state government when the current spending plan expires at midnight Sept. 30. The bad news is that the deal once again cobbles together temporary revenues and fixes, leaving the state’s structural deficit in place for the next governor and Legislature to resolve.
This has the earmarks of a lame-duck plan crafted by politicians who won’t be around to face the consequences next year.
Which is exactly what it is. Peter Luke makes much the same point, saying that the three leaders decided to “reach for the duct tape and tick off as few voters as possible.”
And that is particularly disappointing precisely because all three leaders, and most of the caucuses of both houses of the state legislature, are actual lame ducks. If they chose to do so, they could use the lame-duck session after the November election to do what needs to be done regardless of whether those actions are popular or not. None of them are running for any other seat, so they would suffer no consequences for doing so.
That means putting the state budget on a firm footing for the first time in more than a decade by extending the sales tax to services and moving to a graduated income tax. Raising taxes is never politically popular but after cutting nearly $10 billion out of the state budget over the last decade there are few other meaningful options.
But wishing for Granholm, Bishop and Dillon to do that may well be like wishing for unicorns and rainbows. They all seem content to apply yet another bandaid and leave it to their successors to fix the problem.
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