After winning re-election by a historic landslide, Governor Jennifer Granholm delivered a vitally important state of the state speech six weeks ago. She spoke glowingly of Michigan’s bright future.
“Our economic plan has put us on the right course to reach that destination,” she said. “And we will finally put our fiscal house in order...And we will act with urgency, urgency, urgency,” she said.
Well, it is many weeks later, and, in the immortal words of Clara Peller, where’s the beef? More important, where is the urgency? The problems are very real. The state is running an ever-increasing deficit on a budget that HAS to be balanced by the end of the fiscal year. The state is reporting that tax revenues, already inadequate to cover expenses, are falling short of expectations.
Last year the legislature abolished the Single Business Tax, which, unless replaced, will add another $1.9 billion in red ink to the state budget. Last November, the newly re-elected governor said the lame-duck legislature better do something about it right then. But nothing happened. Nothing happened then, or in January, or in February, and nothing happens still.
By and large, the general public has forgotten about the Michigan budget crisis, which if not stopped is shortly going to hit them like a day-after-Christmas tsunami. Think massive tuition increases for lower quality higher education, school layoffs and diminished state services.
True, the media did pay half-hearted attention for a few days after the governor’s state of the state speech. But Republicans dug their heels in and wouldn’t say anything except “taxes are bad.”
Anna Nicole Smith then died, effectively blotting out news of any significance for weeks, after which a man in Macomb County allegedly cut up his wife and scattered her around a metropark. Before long, we were able to go back to paying no attention whatsoever to anything important.
Whose fault is this? The classic answer is that it is no one’s fault, really, or a little bit of all of our faults. That isn’t good enough, however.
While it is far more important to fix the problem than the blame, I blame Governor Jennifer Granholm for dropping the ball. She knows we are headed for a major financial disaster that could cripple our competitiveness for years. She has some ideas for how to fix it. So what she needed to do is be Winston Churchill. She should have asked for a half hour of television time and had a fireside chat with Michigan. She needed to spell it out, not sugarcoat it. She should have asked us all, then and there, to sacrifice and have told us why. Then, she should have done virtually nothing else except fight, by any means necessary for a rational budget package.
The governor knew this was a hard job. She needs to remember that the voters gave her a landslide mandate to govern. And she needs to use her political capital, right now.
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