“We have no strategy,“ he said on Tim Skubick’s public TV show Off the Record. “We are going from debacle to debacle.”
If you have been paying attention, it is hard to disagree with him, no matter what your politics. Our lawmakers are behaving like the dance band on the Titanic. Our state’s economy has been hit hard, and even bigger icebergs are ahead. And all our leaders do is careen into more of them. Anderson ticked off just a few examples: Our lawmakers vowed to use the federal stimulus money on a variety of new projects to get the economy going.
Instead, they will use virtually all of it to plug the budget deficit, rather than cutting services and raising taxes on those who can afford to pay. Two years ago, they reassured us that the new Michigan Business Tax would be stable, secure, and an improvement on the old Single Business Tax.
And it was, for about a week. Then the lawmakers stuck a 22 percent surcharge on it, because they were too gutless to balance the budget in any more responsible way. Nor have they done anything since to address our massive structural budget problem.
You see, even in good times, the state is guaranteed to take in less money every year than it plans to spend. Deficit spending is illegal, so we get last-minute budget cuts.
Now, with the recession, the crack has become the Grand Canyon. This year, state lawmakers can plug most of it with the federal stimulus money. Next year the deficit will be far larger, and even bigger the year after that, when the federal stimulus money will be gone. And thanks to term limits, the governor will be gone too.
What we need to do is be preparing for the hurricane that is about to hit. Yes, we need to create a new basis for our economy.
But first we have to prepare to survive the next few years, and preserve what is essential for our state’s future prosperity, education being one major tool.
One thing we could do fairly easily is eliminate a lot of waste and inefficiency. We have literally hundreds of governments in this state, from townships to special assessment districts. Two months ago, the Commission on Government Efficiency identified billions in potential savings, largely from consolidating services.
But nothing has happened. That’s partly because of a couple of laws that need to be changed to make cooperation easier. But the real problem are the vested interests whose lobbyists for years have prevented the legislature from doing the right thing.
We can’t afford to keep doing the wrong one. We are facing the edge of a cliff, and we need to demand that if our leaders can’t make our landing soft, that they try to make sure we can at least survive.
One small point that got too little time in the "On the Record" interview with Patrick Anderson, was the identification of Michigan's "structural" budget deficit.
In years to come, what we are likely to see is that many levels of government in the state of Michigan (i.e., the state, and counties like Wayne and Macomb) will see that the gold-plated benefits and pensions that were promised to municipal employees are bankrupting them, much like the benefits promised to the UAW by the Detroit Three. In contrast, Oakland County, which has seen marginally lower taxes and better growth, with bare-bones governmental growth, is likely to be in a better position to survive lean years in the future.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 18, 2009 at 01:55 PM
You seem to mention term limits quite often. Do you feel term limits are a cause of Michigan's gutless, rudderless legislators.
I agree, there's nobody at the tiller.
Posted by: Muskegon Critic | May 22, 2009 at 12:12 AM