The major league baseball season is starting, as are the hockey and basketball playoffs. We‘re beginning to think we may have seen the last of snow. Kids are riding their bikes for the first time in months. Yet for hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, things aren‘t quite the same; they’ve lost their jobs. Unemployment has nearly doubled in the state over the last year.
Now, anyone who has lived here a long time has seen recessions before. We hunkered down, and sooner or later people start buying cars again, and everything eventually turned out all right. But this time is different, and everyone knows it.
Within less than two weeks, we’ll find out whether Chrysler is going to survive, this time as a part of the Italian automaker Fiat, or whether it is going to declare bankruptcy and possibly be dissolved.
Within six weeks, we’ll find out whether General Motors will declare bankruptcy, or whether it can come up with a plan to shrink itself so dramatically as to win more loans from the government.
Either way, this is not good news, not in the short run, anyway. These automakers have shed hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years. Under even the best-case scenario, they are certain to shed many more. Meanwhile, a tidal wave is approaching state government, and nobody seems adequately concerned. Here’s what’s happening.
Every month, the government is taking in less money than it counted on, thanks to the recession.
More than $100 million a month less, a figure that is accelerating. What this means is that the state is going to have to make dramatic cuts of something like a billion dollars by September.
You would think the governor and the lawmakers would be working overtime trying to figure out rationally what to cut, so they don’t have to take a meat ax to education at the end of the day.
Yet they seem lost in some alternate universe. Republicans are talking mainly about cutting the Michigan Business Tax, which might be a good idea but at this point would only add to the deficit.
Oh, they talk about the need to make deep spending cuts, but are vague about what to cut. As for the governor, she appears to be waiting for Godot to show up with some money.
That’s not happening either. Actually, what the politicians are really hoping is to use as much of the stimulus as they can to plug the deficit. That might work now, but it won’t next year, when things will be worse. We are sailing into uncharted seas.
We may not want to face this, but we have to. We need our elected leaders to level with us and themselves, to tell us honestly how bad things are and what they and we can do about it.
And I suggest we start demanding they do so, right now.
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