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State of the State: The Party of Big Business?
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
“Who here would like to return to Michigan in 2009?” asked Governor Snyder to a silent House chamber in Wednesday’s State of the State address. Apparently, House Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer.
The Democratic Senate Minority Leader’s Democratic response was fiercely partisan – if apparently delivered from an alternative universe. “Unemployment has gone up, while paychecks have gone down,” she complained of Snyder’s two years in office.
Huh? Michigan’s unemployment rate when Snyder took office was 11.7 percent (14.2 percent in 2009). Today it stands at 8.9. The state’s per capita income is up – growing at the 9th fastest pace in the union.
But Whitmer’s central theme – echoing the Obama- in-2012 campaign – is that the Gateway CEO-turned-guv has “favored the bottom line of corporations over the middle class.”
The evidence is otherwise. Under Jennifer Granholm, Democrats pursued an economic policy narrowly tailored to politically-connected Big Business. Tax breaks went to the few at the expense of the many: Big Wind firms, Big Battery companies like LGChem and A123 Systems, and Big Hollywood filmmakers (including a million smackaroos to 99 Percent advocate Michael Moore).
By contrast, Snyder’s tax breaks target all businesses: His repeal of the Michigan Business Tax, personal property tax, and onerous regulations (over 1000 eliminated in 2012 alone) have benefited all, not just the privileged few. Combined with right-to-work’s historic passage and Snyder has hung out a “Welcome Jobs” sign on Michigan’s front door.
State of the State: Snyder’s Detroit outreach
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
Detroit pundits were quick to pounce on Governor Snyder’s apparent snub of Detroit in his State of the State remarks. True, Snyder steered clear of the city’s financial and criminal crises. No doubt, the state’s sensitive negotiations with the city over a financial manager had something to do with his decision. But a closer look at the speech reveals a governor very much engaged in solving the problems holding Detroiters back. Too bad that Snyder – like Mitt Romney before him – doesn’t understand their political value as well.
Both of Snyder’s guests of honor – young black men standing proud in the visitors’ gallery – highlighted education and job training initiatives essential to struggling Detroiters.
Snyder introduced young Kenta Roberts, a Detroit student who has benefited from One Tough Nerd’s controversial Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a program set up to isolate – and address – Detroit’s lowest-performing schools in order to better prepare their kids for college.
Despite the EAA’s efforts to help Detroit’s most vulnerable children, union-bound Democrats have fiercely resisted its reforms – including a Detroit school board vote to withdraw from the state-run authority. “I urge every legislator to take the opportunity early this year to visit the EAA schools, talk to students, parents and teachers, and see the transformation,” said Snyder in his address.
The governor also introduced Anton Stinson-Winters, an East Detroiter who has benefited from the Summer Youth Employment Initiative (SEI)- a state program designed to give underprivileged youth (in this case ages 16 to 19) employment opportunities.
Both programs are evidence that the ONLY party committed to changing Detroit’s status quo is the GOP. Yet, Republicans like Snyder have been shy to celebrate this fact. From charter schools to EAA innovation, GOPers would go a long way to changing black voters minds about Republicans if they trumpeted the stories of Kenta Roberts and Anton Stimson-Wintersevery single day.
State of the State: The Snyder model
Posted by hpayne on January 17, 2013
What was remarkable about tonight’s State of the State address from Governor Rick Snyder was how unremarkable it was.
The state’s budget is balanced without tricks or gimmicks, its long-term liabilities are under control, and there is $500 million in the state rainy day fund. Even the “controversial” portion of One Tough Nerd’s speech – that he wanted to raise road user fees – was not controversial (user fees are a dedicated revenue stream to pay for essential government services).
Yet just two years ago, the state could take none of these fundamentals for granted. Under Jennifer Granholm, the state budget was in perpetual budget crisis, its governor substituted class warfare for serious pension or health cost liabilities reform, and the state’s rainy day fund was nearly threadbare with just $2 million in the cookie jar.
What was once Michigan’s dysfunction is now the nation’s.
President Barack Obama has followed the Granholm formula to a tee, and today Washington is in perpetual crisis, steered by an executive more interested in scoring political points than government fundamentals. “We’re a role model,” cheered Snyder in his SOS speech. “Washington should follow the model we’re using here. We do things right.”
In truth, one-third of Washington is following the Snyder model – the Republican-controlled House, which has passed budgets as well as proposed solutions for long-term entitlement liabilities (typically, Nerd the Non-partisan refuses to give his own party credit). Meanwhile, President Granholm II and his Democratic Senate have failed to pass a budget in three years.
If America has wanted a Michigan model, it would have elected the Nerd’s twin, Mitt Romney.
Payne: Media-induced warming
Posted by hpayne on January 9, 2013
Just in time for the Detroit Auto Show, America’s news media is hysterically trumpeting “the hottest year ever” in the United States to advance a leftist agenda forcing ever more costly emissions regulations on vehicles – and the larger economy.
“The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States,” begins the relentlessly alarmist A1 New York Times story of January 9.
Whatever happened to global warming?
Just across the pond, England recorded the second coldest year since 1996 (behind the record-low temperatures of 2010) – including the unusually cold and wet weather of the 2012 London Olympics. Global freezing, anyone?
As the England weather indicates, the Times is cherry-picking weather facts to advance its climate agenda. In fact, as the Times less sensationalistic cousin, the London Telegraph reports, GLOBAL temperatures have stopped rising in defiance of the Left’s fevered predictions.
“A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth,” reports the paper. “This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record ” suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.”
Oh.
Climate is a lot more complicated than hyperventilating reporters would have you believe. Yes, the world is getting hotter – as it emerges from the Little Ice Age of the mid-19th century. The Times wants you to believe that this is caused by SUVs. But separating natural climate variability from man-made contributions is very difficult indeed – with the 2oth century full of weather swings like the U.S. felt in 2012.
Most importantly, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Even if the media’s U.N.-led objective of 80 percent CO2 cuts by 2050 were enacted, the estimated temperature rise would be reduced by a mere 7 percent – at crippling economic cost.
Payne: Stabenow’s cliff breaks for the rich
Posted by hpayne on January 7, 2013
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow champions herself as a friend of the working class – but when it came to the fiscal cliff, she was saving her Big Business pals first.
Stabenow was first in line at the trough as the White House and Senate loaded the cliff bill with corporate goodies.
“Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow was able to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of Nascar tracks (cost: $78 million) to benefit the paupers who control the Michigan International Speedway,” reports The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Other beneficiaries included GE, Goldman Sachs, and Star-Kist Tuna.
While Stabenow also applauded the $400k individual tax rate hike, her corporate cronies were cheerleading with her – because small business people with Subchapter S Corps. are more likely hammered by such rate hikes. Meanwhile, publicly-traded Big Business got a break on dividend taxes – and all that yummy pork.
Alex Brill, a former aide to GOPers on the House Ways and Means Committee, explains that many questionable tax breaks – like the motorsports benefit backed by International Speedway Corp. and Stabenow (Debbie’s Michigan friends at Whirlpool and the biofuels industry also got breaks) – are often made temporary in such catch-all bills. Why?
“If you make them permanent, you get the campaign contribution once,” explains Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. “You do it every year or two, they have to ante up again and again.”
Oh, Debbie, we hardly knew ye.
Payne: Murder capital, fatherless capital
Posted by hpayne on January 3, 2013
While Barack Obama declared victory in the fiscal cliff theater, the mean streets of Detroit Friday brought a sobering reminder of the country’s biggest loss – and the president’s failure to address it.
Detroit is Murder Capital once more with a bloody 53 murders per 100,000 residents, returning to murder numbers not seen since the horrific 1970s (and soaring above 2006’s 47 per 100,000 rate when Detroit was last Number One).
If the president’s refusal to embrace Washington’s fundamental spending problems is irresponsible, his refusal to address Detroit (and inner city America’s) fundamental family implosion is a matter of life and death.
I do not mean to suggest that Detroit’s violence is solely a presidential responsibility – it is most immediately a local crime problem. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy courageously points at Detroit’s police leadership for not putting in place more thorough crime tracking – the solution that Mayor Rudy Giuliani (another prosecutor) brought to out-of-control New York in the 1980s and that has helped reduce that city’s killing rate from 30 to just 6 per 100,000 today.
“It can be done,” an impassioned Worthy told The Detroit News editorial board in December.
But the long-term problem is a matter of cultural change – and the president has the unique status as a black man at the head of a nuclear family, a rarity in America’s impoverished inner cities.
The number one indicator of poverty in America is the lack of a two-parent family. Eighty percent of Detroit families are fatherless, seeding every social pathology from illiteracy to crime. In 1960, 25 percent of Detroit black residents were born to single mothers. By 1980, that number had climbed to 48 percent and the murder rate was shadowing it upward step-by-step. According to academic research, over 50 percent of black men in Detroit are high-school dropouts. In 2004, 72 percent of those dropouts were jobless. By their mid-30s, 60 percent have done prison time.
Yet, Obama has ignored this crisis and instead crossed the river to Canada to import another one: Nationalized health care. Sure, socialized medicine will consolidate his party’s power, but it does nothing to raise Detroit children from poverty.
Worse, Obama’s federal welfare expansion is exacerbating the problem. Lest you think this is a racial problem, read New York Times liberal columnist Nicolas Kristof who traveled to white, underclass Appalachia last year to find the same pathologies in a population with 50 percent, welfare-driven, illegitimacy rates:
Conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. . . . Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments. Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
From Appalachia to Detroit, welfare-driven illegitimacy is trapping children in crime and poverty. It’s the family, stupid.
Where are you, Mr. President?
Payne: Obama does Detroit delusion
Posted by hpayne on January 2, 2013
DC is looking a lot like Detroit. How dysfunctional is Barack Obama’s Washington?
The president (and the GOP Congress) set an artificial deadline to take the country over the cliff a year ago, then did nothing to avert his man-made disaster until the 11th hour, and now claims victory for saving America’s middle class from another recession.
But if tax increases on all Americans are economically damaging, then how is Obama’s celebrated 4 percent hike on folks earning over $400,000 a year – many of them small businesses – economically beneficial?
Think of Detroit which is almost totally dependent on wealthy entrepreneurs these days for economic growth. Think of billionaire businessman Mike Ilitch who – as MIView estimated two years ago at the last fiscal cliff – will now send $10 million more a year down Washington’s ravenous entitlement piehole rather than investing that money here in his sports stadiums, pizza business, etc. Think of Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert who has been investing in Detroit real estate and businesses, but who will now have to send millions more to Washington’s inefficient bureaucracy.
Feel better?
Indeed, Detroit itself is a cautionary tale against Obama’s plan for the nation. Years of neglecting its long-term debt liabilities – even as the city raised its income and property taxes to record highs – has put Detroit on the brink of bankruptcy. As Detroit goes, writes The National Review’s Kevin Williamson, so goes the nation. Obama’s brazen refusal to acknowledge Washington’s spending problem at the fiscal cliff is an echo of Detroit’s bankruptcy cliff denial this past two years.
The media bears co-responsibility with Obama for misleading the public on the fiscal cliff calamity, virtually ignoring the spending side of the ledger which is what is driving us into Euro-style debt. While parroting Obama’s claim that trillion-dollar deficits could be plugged by tax increase on upper incomes, the MSM failed to inform its readers that the tax hikes will raise a mere $60 billion a year – a drop in the bucket compared to the $1.1 trillion deficits Obama is currently running.
As a result of this media malpractice, Obama got away with not committing to a SINGLE SPENDING CUT as part of the cliff deal, even nixing the small .2 percent decrease – from 1.6 to 1.4 percent – in Social Security benefit GROWTH that he and GOPers had agreed to. Detroit City Council would be proud.
“One sign of progress came as Republicans withdrew a long-discussed proposal to slow future cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients as part of a compromise to avoid the cliff,” reported AP on Sunday. “Democrats said earlier Sunday that proposal had put a damper on the talks, and Republican senators emerging from a closed-door GOP meeting said it is no longer part of the equation.”
Earth to AP: It’s not “progress” when you ignore your spending addiction.
The debt delusion continues this AM with AP claiming that “middle- and low-income families will pay higher taxes too” because the payroll tax will go up from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent as a result of the cliff deal. But 6.2 percent is where it has always been. The 2 percent “cut” – putting SS further into debt – was a momentary political gimmick to goose (it didn’t) the economy. The tax holiday is now over.
In the end the cliff was part of Obama’s long-term game to make government bigger. Given Washington’s ineptitude in this manufactured crisis, does anyone think that’s a good idea?
Payne: Happy Bulb Year
Posted by hpayne on December 31, 2012
Happy New Year, America, the lights are still on.
The EPA’s ban on the common light bulb has been staved off for another year thanks to Michigan Rep. Fred Upton and House Republicans. A year ago, Upton & Co. short-circuited the Obama administration’s elimination of the incandescent bulb by inserting language in the annual omnibus Appropriations Bill defunding federal energy standards that would have made the bulb illegal for sale.
And since the U.S. government runs on continuing resolutions these days (thanks to Senate Democrats’ inability to pass budgets), the language has survived the CR passed and signed before the election . That CR only gets us to March, sources say, but the bulb language should survive any CRs and appropriations bills for the rest of 2013.
The bulb ban, of course, is the poster child of Obama’s zealous War on Carbon.
It’s a war that dates back to the Bush Administration which originally targeted the bulb for the scrap heap – despite the fact that incandescents make for 85 percent of bulb purchases. Upton was Bush’s bagman for the bulb ban. But after a national outcry over the bulb’s looming elimination, Upton saw the, um, light – and did yeoman’s work in correcting his mistake.
Alas, the bulb’s salvation came too late for hundreds of American jobs that have been lost to China as the lighting industry moved jobs overseas in anticipation of making the more expensive incandescent replacement, the CFL (compact fluorescent light). Washington’s favorite crony capitalist, General Electric, had long lobbied for a bulb ban in order to force consumers to buy more expensive CFLs. Like the EPA’s War on Coal, green means job loss.
At least consumers can cheer. At my local Kroger’s grocery, 100 watt bulbs sell for $4.99 for a pack of four. Their CFL replacements, meanwhile, cost a whopping $4.99 EACH.
That is, the common bulb is four times cheaper than politically-correct CFLs. And CFLs don’t always last four times longer. Despite EPA & MSM claims (USA Today has been one of the most egregious mouthpieces for government propaganda) claims, CFLs do not necessarily last longer than common bulbs. CFLs work best in places where the lights stay on – turning them on and off frequently shortens their life span. Which is why consumers want bulb choice – not government mandates.
“We heard the message loud and clear from Americans who don’t want government standards determining how they light their homes,” said Michigan Congressman Upton in late 2011. Democrats are still deaf to America’s calls, but thanks to House GOPers – and the tireless efforts of activists like Myron Ebell of Freedom Action – the bulb lives.
Payne: Lisa Jackson’s holy war
Posted by hpayne on December 29, 2012
If it seemed like retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson carried out her job with a religious zeal, you’d be right.
Barack Obama’s pick as his first EPA administrator told a 2010 National Council of Churches conference in New Orleans that government and religious leaders must unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
“The question now is, ‘What we can do?'” the green-church devotee concluded, adding that her efforts were blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership.
Her legion of Washington media disciples — who would have condemned such moral bravado by the Religious Right — ignored her rhetoric. But in punishing those she deems carbon sinners, Lisa Jackson has done enormous harm to American workers.
Today, thousands of coal miners are without work as her power plant regulations (backed by a president who embraced Jackson’s crusade, calling global warming “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation”) have bankrupted mining companies such as Patriot Coal and forced others such as OhioAmerica and Alpha Natural Resources to downsize. An oil opponent, Jackson successfully lobbied the president to reject the transcontinental Keystone Pipeline,costing the U.S. some 20,000 jobs. Her global warming zeal extended to autos when she took the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) away from the Transportation Department — mandating that auto companies meet a pie-in-the-sky standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025 in an attempt to eliminate the internal combustion engine (the industry is spending millions on lobbying to water down the rules).
Jackson’s holy war created a rogue agency unanswerable to Congress. Her coal and CAFE edicts were done without the input of America’s elected representatives, creating a backlash that has led to endless hearings before Congressional Republicans. Despite the House revolt, Jackson’s agency churned on with its wave of rules. The resulting job consequences were illustrated in a dramatic photo-op with coal miners and Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign at a Murray Energy facility in Ohio — an event met with a near blackout by national media.
Rumors abound that Jackson’s resignation is the result of controversy over secret e-mails that Jackson authored exposing her War on Coal. But her public actions are scandalous enough. Having forced the shutdown of dozens of coal plants, the EPA chief dropped one final bomb before Election Day — announcing carbon caps that effectively end new coal plant construction in the U.S.
“This agency (knows) no bounds,” said Chris Hamilton, senior V.P. of the West Virginia Coal Association after the new rules were announced. “Their actions don’t take into consideration people’s livelihoods, jobs, or the existing liability of energy companies.”
With more regulations in the pipeline covering everything from “environmental justice” (Jackson subscribes to the radical theory that the location of industrial plants discriminates against poor minorities) to natural gas fracking, the reign of Jackson cannot end soon enough.
Payne: Rep. Camp back at the cliff
Posted by hpayne on December 26, 2012
“This is consensus on a very intractable issue: What do we do about expiring tax policy?” thrilled Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, two years ago when President Obama and new House Republican majority agreed to avert the fiscal cliff of 2010 by extending all the Bush-era tax cuts.
Camp was encouraged not only by the crisis diverted but by the hope for future tax reform “because of the process of coming together and reaching an agreement. I am very encouraged by what the president has been saying publicly. They do want to begin (tax reform) and that is a big thing.”
It was a misreading of his Democratic adversary.
In fact, Obama followed his 2010 compromise – signed in the face of the GOP’s landslide, tea party-led Congressional gains and ferocious Democratic opposition including Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – by immediately hitting the campaign trail, rejecting the Simpson-Bowles tax reform commission, creating the 2011 debt talks crisis, and generally re-arming for the 2012 presidential campaign.
And so here we are back at the same fiscal cliff two years later.
As 2010 showed, the fiscal cliff solution is simple: Settle financial markets with a compromise extending Republican tax rates – and Democratic stimulus spending – and then return to the table once blood pressures have cooled for comprehensive budget-tax reform.
But this time, Obama is in no mood for compromise.
This is a smash-mouth presidency (not unlike the crisis-to-crisis Granholm gubernatorial years) about short-term political scores, not long-term solutions. And this time Obama has claimed the upper hand in the wake of his 2012 election win. Never mind that Republicans also won, maintaining the status quo that should augur for a 2010-style compromise.
“You get nothing. I get that for free,” Obama told compromise-minded Boehner after the House Majority Leader put $800 billion in tax revenue through closed loopholes on the table, reports The Wall Street Journal.
As in 2010, Republicans like Camp and Boehner are still operating under the assumption that President Obama wants long-term fixes – to the tax code, to the debt crisis, to trillion-dollar deficits.
But as the two years since 2010 prove, Obama is interested only in winning, not solutions (he has never put serious spending reductions on the table). And though his 2012 “win” was hardly as clear-cut as he claims – and certainly not the mandate the GOP had after the 2010 mid-terms – he and his media have declared it so. Together with Democratic rank-and-file resistance to another 2010-style compromise (then, Democratic leaders refused to even appear at the signing ceremony), Obama feels that he will win this round of brinkmanship (and he will if Republicans are thick enough to let tax cuts expire for everyone).
Rep. Camp may have thought he heard signs of bipartisanship in 2010 – but it was the sound of one hand clapping.
Payne: Mayan Apocalypse cancels Michigan classes (really)
Posted by hpayne on December 20, 2012
LaPeer public schools are cancelling classes due to unsubstantiated threats related to the Mayan apocalypse and the school shooting in Connecticut. We’re not making this up.
“The Connecticut school massacre and doomsday scenarios based on the Mayan calendar have prompted the closing of dozens of Michigan schools. . . for Thursday and Friday,” reports AP from Flint.
In a note to parents on the Lapeer website, Schools Superintendant Matt Wandriw actually went on the record about this nonsense.
“Good evening, I apologize for the timing of this message, but I have important information to share with you,” he wrote. “Given the recent events in Connecticut, there have been numerous rumors circulating in our district, and in neighboring districts, about potential threats of violence against students. Additionally, rumors connected to the Mayan calendar predicted end of the world on Friday have also surfaced. These rumors of violence have been thoroughly investigated and determined to be false. There have been no credible threats made against any of our students. However, these rumors have been a serious distraction for students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Therefore, given the significant disruption to the teaching and learning process, I have decided, along with my fellow superintendents of Lapeer County, to cancel school for both. On behalf of the Board of Education, teachers, administrators, and support personnel, I wish each of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”
In sum: Dude, let’s say we’re concerned about violence and blow off school to take an extended Christmas break!
The parents inconvenienced by this irresponsible shirking of education responsibilities should be outraged. Hard-working parents. Single moms that must scramble for daycare, etc.
Ho ho horrible.
Payne: Taxpayers take a Government Motors bath
Posted by hpayne on December 19, 2012
Now we know the reason why the Obama administration spurned General Motors’ offers to buy back U.S. Treasury stock until after the election.
In fact, we have 13 billion reasons.
A month after Obama’s re-election – an election won in part due to the Obama campaign’s boast that it saved GM and Chrysler – GM announced today that it would buy back 40 percent of Washington’s stock at just half the price needed for taxpayers to break even on their investment. That’s at least a $13 billion loss according to The Detroit News (AP pegs the loss at $21B when remaining shares are sold).
Ironically, the GM losses will not negatively impact the TARP program’s bottom line, because the banks that also received TARP money have paid back their loans with profit to the taxpayers. That is, the Wall Street banks that Obama demonized for his class warfare strategy are covering his keister on GM losses.
We can’t make this stuff up.
GM’s losses, however, do not include the billions lost by Delphi salaried workers whose pensions were gutted by the White House (even as UAW Delphi pensions were made whole) and billions more lost by pensioners (including Indiana teachers and firefighters) when Obama’s White House Task Force illegally gave preference to Democrat-donating Big Labor over secured bondholders.
Though GM has been desperate to unload federal shares for the past year to escape the “Government Motors” stigma, the losses would have been a nightmare for an Obama campaign that claimed its bailout was an unmitigated success. Indeed, selling the shares during the campaign would have exposed Obama (and Obamedia’s) Big Lie that he did not let GM go bankrupt. GM’s stock price suggests that Obama’s managed Chapter 363 bankruptcy was a less efficient solution for taxpayers than Mitt Romney’s managed Chapter 11.
The share price further reflects a GM that continues to struggle against more efficient rivals unburdened by union contracts (not to mention the drag of Obama model-Euro unions on Opel) – and with government mandates forcing it to sell unprofitable green vehicles. The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) reports that GM pension obligations are about $24 billion under-funded meaning the General will likely have to issue more stock to pay UAW obligations – further cheapening the 19 percent of GM shares that taxpayers still own.
“Almost a year and a half ago, Treasury could have sold taxpayers’ GM stake for about $30 a share. They wouldn’t. Shares are now down about 20 percent from then, resulting in an additional loss in value of about $3 billion for taxpayers,” reported NLPC in scolding the White House decision last September not to sell immediately. “Treasury will continue to gamble taxpayer money on GM and continue to stay invested as they market-time their exit.”
“Unfortunately for America,” they continue, “the gains they seek by the gamble are political rather than monetary.”
Payne: Monaghan sues Obamacare
Posted by hpayne on December 18, 2012
Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, a Michigan business titan and devout Roman Catholic, filed suit in a Michigan federal district court against Obamacare Friday over the law’s forced coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization.
Joining a raft of legal complaints from religious groups against the controversial law, Monaghan’s federal suit cites a violation of his First Amendment rights – and claims the law violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act as well.
The filing was almost competently ignored by Michigan’s establishment media.
“The government intentionally declared war on a specific religion using the HHS mandate as its weapon,” said a representative for the Thomas More Law Center which which represents Monaghan. “Because Mr. Monaghan believes it is his religious duty to provide insurance coverage for his employees and their families, he will not abandon them. Yet he intends to show his vehement opposition to this unconstitutional mandate which threatens the religious liberties of all Americans.”
He now runs Ava Maria University in Florida, the Ava Maria Mutual Funds, and other interests after selling Michigan-based Domino’s in 1998 to Bain Capital. The suit also lists as a plaintiff Domino’s Farms, a Michigan office park complex that Monaghan still owns.
Like many Catholic-run institutions, Monaghan’s companies offer health insurance to employees that excludes contraception and abortion on religious grounds. Obamacare’s violation of religious freedoms became a hot issue in the 2012 presidential campaign – and was distorted by Obama & Media as a “war on women.” In addition to Catholic suits, the law has also provoked concern among Michigan counties and Michigan food service companies that they won’t be able to afford Obamacare’s expensive coverage mandates.
The MSM’s refusal to cover the religious and business storm around Obamacare does a disservice to a public that will soon be feeling its effects.
Payne: The Weiser hit job, Part 2
Posted by hpayne on December 17, 2012
Ron Weiser is drawing “objections from critics who say he disrespected and stereotyped Detroit because of its large African-American and low-income population. . . . The Rev. David Bullock, Michigan chairman of the Rainbow Push Coalition, said Weiser’s comments are racist, classist and disheartening,” smeared The Detroit Free Press this weekend in its attempt to marginalize ex-Michigan GOP Chair Ron Weiser for spearheading Michigan right-to-work legislation.
But in their gleeful, 800-word hit job, the Freep and their Democratic Party allies forgot a couple of important points: The Jewish Weiser is himself an ethnic minority – and a major giver to black causes.
Indeed, Weiser is not just a prominent philanthropist who has been involved in Detroit’s resurrection – but he is a former chairman of the board of the United Negro College Fund in Washtenaw County (where he lives).
Details, details.
“We have a major Republican figure in Michigan and nationally who is making racist stereotype remarks about voters in Detroit,” Michigan Democratic Chairman Mark Brewer told The Freep.
Does the Democratic Establishment really believe that? Or is it so desperate to smear RTW that it will ruin the reputation of anyone associated with it – even one of Michigan’s most respected Jewish citizens?
Payne: The Weiser hit job
Posted by hpayne on December 16, 2012
For decades, Detroit vote fraud has been legendary – if hard to prove.
Under the notoriously corrupt administration of Kwame Kilpatrick, fraud complaints reached a fever pitch in the 2004 presidential election and the 2005 mayoral election with allegations of vote coaching, vote buying, ballot tampering, and dead people voting. In 2004, Republican charges of ballot tampering at Cobo Center led to police intervention. In 2005, fraud accusations by Kilpatrick’s Democratic opponent, Freman Hendrix, led to a federal judge calling Detroit voting processes illegal and relieving the city clerk of her duties, the Detroit director of elections asking the Wayne County prosecutor to investigate vote buying, and the FBI launching a full-scale, two-year investigation. When the FBI ended its discovery process with no charges, Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley erupted in fury.
“(The investigation) has ended with no charges filed, no employees indicted and former City Clerk Jackie Currie getting away with her office sending out ballots with Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s name already checked. So is that it? Is that good enough?” the Free Press columnist raged.
Yet, this week, when videotape surfaced of former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Ron Weiser accusing the Kilpatrick Administration of vote fraud, the Free Press. . . suggested Weiser was a racist on its Sunday front page.
Huh?
Echoing similar attacks from the Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer, the Free Press’s hit job on Weiser has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with Weiser’s masterminding Republicans’ successful passage of Michigan right-to-work legislation.
Call it The Empire Strikes Back. Or, more precisely, the Michigan Democratic Establishment Strikes Back.
Weiser and Republican businessman Dick DeVos are credited with spearheading the extraordinary passage of right-to-work in Michigan, the cradle of the United Autoworkers Union. The Democratic establishment, led by The Free Press, Big Labor, and Brewer raged against RTW which threatens Democratic Party fund-raising by giving workers the right to choose whether to pay union dues (dues that ultimately go to electing Democratic candidates).
The Free Press was particularly outspoken – devoting its front page to strident calls to defeat RTW. In defeat, the Freep and Brewer are now trying to smear Weiser as a racist for telling a Milton tea party group back in August that (funny the videotape, taken by a Democratic Party operative, is showing up just now), without the Coleman Young and Kwame Kilpatrick machines, Mitt Romney had a chance to win Michigan.
“There’s no machine to go to pool halls and barbershops and put those people on buses and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times,” says Weiser on the tape.
Though unproven, Weiser’s comments are not inconsistent with past fraud allegations made by Republicans and Democrats alike in Detroit. Yet, the Free Press – the same paper that lamented that the FBI did not convict on those allegations in the past – is now accusing Weiser of racism (ironically, Kilpatrick accused The Freep of racism for investigating his texting/sex scandal).
The charge is absurd on its face. Businessman Weiser is a so-called “Ann Arbor Republican” – economically conservative with a distaste for the GOP’s more strident social policy wing. “I know Ron Weiser and he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” says Matt Davis, an MLive.com columnist and former state GOP employee – who also happens to be African-American.
The Freep’s hit job is consistent with the paper’s partisan 2012 coverage in which it devoted 6 articles in 2 days to Republican Romney’s ill-advised 47 percent comments – while completely ignoring Democrat Obama’s equally outrageous “you didn’t build that” comments about American entrepreneurs.
This time, the Freep ripped Governor Snyder for his support of RTW – but ignored the violence of union thugs who destroyed the hot dog stand of an African-American vendor , Clint Tarver, as they rampaged against right-to-work at the state capitol.
Now that is worthy of a newspaper’s front page.
Payne: Debbie damns Obamacare taxes
Posted by hpayne on December 12, 2012
Finally, bipartisanship in Washington.
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has suddenly noticed – THREE YEARS after she approved Obamacare – that the act punishes medical device-makers with job-killing taxes.
Michigan’s junior senator joined 17 other Democratic U.S. Senators and senators-elect in signing a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week calling for a “delay in the implementation” of the medical device tax in Obamacare, reports the Wall Street Journal.
We’re not making this up. Republican and small businesses have been screaming about the 2.3 percent excise tax – effecting companies like Michigan-based, Stabenow-constituent Stryker (not that you would know reading the press) which has laid off 5 percent of its workers to compensate for its $100M tax bill in 2013.
“The medical technology industry directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States. . . . (The) industry has received little guidance about how to comply with the tax – causing significant uncertainty and confusion for businesses,” reads Stabenow’s letter. “We urge you to support delaying enactment of this provision in a fiscally responsible manner.”
Welcome to Planet Earth, senator.
Meanwhile, she still insists that a hike in income taxes on those making over $250,000 a year – that is, a tax hike that will hammer small businesses – is good for the economy.
A House Small Business tax subcommittee estimates that President Obama’s 5 percent hike on 940,000, small, so-called Subchapter S companies would levy $500B in tax increases and cost 700,000 jobs.
How to explain this dissonance? Democrats are the Party of Big Business.
Corporations like Stryker employ high-paying lobbyists in Washington to get senators’ attention. The small business community – individuals mostly pay Subchapter S taxes – have no such clout. “Democrats sent their letter to Reid less than three weeks after dozens of medical device industry executives ‘swarmed’ Capitol Hill in a lobbying push that resulted in more than 60 different meetings with legislators,” reports The Daily Caller.
Like the Obamacare battle that pitted Big Hospital against doctors and Big Insurance against small clinics, Stabenow chose the Big Boys. But now Big Medical Device doesn’t like Big Hospital’s Obamacare. What is a Democrat to do?
Payne: The anti-choice Left
Posted by hpayne on December 9, 2012
Remember when liberals were pro-choice?
Just weeks after winning a presidential election in which they celebrated an individual’s right to choose gay marriage and abortion, Michigan’s Left is laying siege to the state capitol in a last ditch bid to refuse Michigan workers the right to choose whether to underwrite Big Labor.
On Sunday, the Left’s flagship paper, The Detroit Free Press, used its front page to attack Governor Rick Snyder for boldly defying the state’s Big Labor lobby in favor of granting Michiganians the right-to-work – just as 23 other states (including Indiana) have done. Snyder “is failing to rise to the challenge of tough leadership — having the mettle to stand up to your political allies when they’re wrong, and having the courage to stand by principle, even when your friends pressure you to abandon it,” complained Freep editorial page editor Stephen Henderson in a desperate A1 column. “That’ll cost him, and his party. More important, it will cost Michigan.”
But all the evidence points to the contrary.
“Right-to-work states outperform forced-union states in almost every measurable category of worker well-being,” reports The Wall Street Journal editorial page last year. “A new study in the Cato Journal. . . found that from 1977 through 2007 there was ‘a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth.’ Right-to-work states experienced a 23 percent faster rise in per capita income over that period. The two regions that have lost the most jobs in recent years, the once-industrial Northeast and Midwest, are mostly forced-union states.”
Michiganians intuitively understand this as they have watched the auto industry move south to right-to-work states over the last three decades with foreign transplants like Kia, VW, and BMW all making right-to-work a priority in where they locate new plants.
As a result, Michigan voters support RTW by a 51-41 margin, according to a new poll by Steve Mitchell. This solid support defies Freep claims that the governor’s position came from” acquiescing to a radical GOP cabal.”
You’re not a radical cabal if the majority supports you.
Governor Snyder stood on the principle of individual liberty in explaining his Johnny-come-lately embrace of RTW: “The unions ought to be able to present a good value proposition, instead of saying you have to join a union to keep your job,” he explained to The Freep. “This isn’t to damage the unions. It isn’t anti-union. This could make unions better, by making them more responsive to their members.”
Henderson laments the divisiveness that Snyder’s RTW reversal will bring: “On Tuesday, when the Legislature resumes its right-to-work steamroller, the streets will be filled. We’ll be Wisconsin.”
What planet has he been on the last two years?
The state capital has been under siege since 2010 by unions protesting Snyder’s education, labor, and spending reforms. Despite the governor’s conciliatory rhetoric, not a single Democrat has supported his major reforms.
In truth, the governoronly switched positions on right-to-work when the UAW’s Bob King betrayed him last March in putting Prop 2 on the ballot – a slap in Snyder’s face that would have outlawed worker’s right-to-work IN THE STATE CONSTITUTION. Michigan’s “radical cabal” of voters defeated that power grab by 58-42 percent on Nov. 6.
But Henderson’s feigned outrage over Snyder’s “betrayal” is particularly rich given The Freep’s support of Obamacare.
Henderson & Co. have vigorously defended that divisive legislation – despite no bipartisan support, despite Obama’s strong-arming the law through Congress including lying to former GOP Rep. Bart Stupak that it would not federally-fund abortion, and despite its unpopularity with American voters. Now that’s a radical cabal.
“The money, the time, the bitter feelings — none of it will be worth it. Right-to-work will consume Michigan politics for years to come,” writes The Freep without a hint of irony – the same publication that deemed Obamacare worthy despite its cost in jobs, debt, and national unity.
” How much more radical (the GOP)has become,” concludes Henderson. “Snyder was the hope for something different — and better.” Better is exactly what Snyder has delivered: A RTW bill that is popular with the public, that will bring jobs back to Michigan, and that will give every Michigan worker freedom of choice.
That’s radical?
Payne: The Nerd follows The Knife
Posted by hpayne on December 6, 2012
The Nerd mimics The Knife.
Rick Snyder’s gubernatorial twin, Indiana Businessman-Governor Mitch “The Knife” Daniels, for years vowed that he had no interest in signing a right-to-work bill. Like Snyder, Daniels saw it as an unnecessarily divisive issue that impeded his budget reform priorities.
Yet when Indiana’s right-to-work bill crossed Daniels’ desk this January, The Knife proudly signed it. And at that moment, the game changed for Rick Snyder as well. Just one year later, One Tough Nerd announced at a news conference today that he, too, would support a right-to-work law from his Republican legislature – making Indiana’s neighbor the second Midwest R2W state.
“This is inconsistent with Snyder’s goals to concentrate on making Michigan more attractive to business,” said an angry Mark Schauer, ex-Democratic Michigan Congressman and Big Labor tool, on The Frank Beckmann Show this AM.
No, it’s exactly in line with those goals.
“In this lousy national economy, Indiana needs every advantage it can get,” said The Knife in January. Ditto The Nerd. With a stroke of his pen, Daniels instantly made Indiana more competitive to business – and Michigan (the cradle of the UAW) less so. As The Michigan View’s Robert Laurie reported in February, Caterpillar almost instantly relocated a plant from union-friendly Illinois to Muncie, Indiana. Indeed, as anyone covering the auto industry in the last few decades knows, foreign transplants like Kia make right-to-work a priority in picking states for manufacturing expansion.
Add Big Labor’s political miscalculation in the 2012 campaign of trying to undo Snyder’s first term reforms with the needlessly expensive, $30 million, Prop 2 campaign and you have One Determined Nerd to support right-to-work in Michigan.
Like Daniels in Indiana – who didn’t sign R2W until he had secured a second term – the political timing is good for Snyder as well: By signing a R2W bill in the current lame duck session, Republicans will have two full years to see R2W successfully implemented in Michigan. Come the guv’s re-election campaign in 2014, voters will see that the sky didn’t fall – indeed, that R2W helped Michigan’s business outlook and empowers individuals by giving them workplace choice.
Snyder and Republicans are learning what 23 other R2W states already know: That right-to-work brings higher jobs growth and higher per capita incomes.
The Nerd bravely goes where The Knife has gone before. Call him “The Spine.”
Payne: The War for Worker Freedom
Posted by hpayne on December 5, 2012
UAW President Bob King, led a violent, mob union protest against the Republican legislature’s right-to-work bills in Lansing Thursday – but it’s King that the protestors should be turning against. Were it not for his introduction of the divisive Prop 2 in November’s campaign, right-to-work would not be an issue today.
With his March announcement of a constitutional amendment to ban right-to-work and reverse Republican-led government reforms, sources say that King united a broad coalition of business, grass-roots activists, and legislators in a long-term strategy to not only defeat Prop 2 – but to enact game-changing right-to-work legislation in Michigan.
Politics is about personalities as well as issues, and King’s key mistake was honking off Governor Snyder who, until King’s Prop 2 provocation, had tried to keep right-to-work on the sidelines.
But Prop 2 – which would also have overturned Snyder’s key budget reforms – forced One Tough Nerd’s hand.
From March on, Snyder joined conservative activists that were paving the ground – not just to defeat Prop 2 – but give every Michigan worker the freedom of right-to-work. It was an audacious strategy that took full form at The West Michigan Policy Conference in September. The conference brings together the state’s top conservative business leaders, legislators, economists, and activists – and the agenda was heavy on right-to-work.
The message was clear and it was aimed at a national audience: If King aimed to make Michigan Ground Zero to eliminate right-to-work, then business interests should make Michigan Ground Zero to enact right-to-work.
In short, defeating Prop 2 AND passing R2W in Michigan – the cradle of the UAW- would be a crippling blow to the national labor movement.
America’s fastest-growing states are right-to-work states. Indeed, Michigan has been losing jobs to southern R2W states (now including Indiana) for decades. No state would be more symbolic of labor’s decline than passage of right-to-work in Michigan. In pushing for right-to-work today, Governor Snyder – and his House and Senate partners, Bolger and Richardville – are not just crowning a strategy that has been in place for months, they are winning a major battle in America’s War for Worker Freedom.
If Snyder & Co. sign right-to-work in the next week, they will have fully committed to a war that was launched by King last March. That war will finally be won when Snyder wins re-election in 2014 – and any labor referendum to overturn right-to-work goes down in flames.
Payne: Obama auto tax breaks for the rich
Posted by hpayne on December 5, 2012
Thanks to President Obama’s massive tax breaks for wealthy auto buyers, hybrid-electric vehicle sales in November rose to a lofty 3.5 percent of all vehicle sales — numbers the industry hasn’t seen since the summer of 2008 when gasoline hit $4 a gallon.
Electric vehicles are targeted at customers making over $200,000 — and they are generously rewarded for their politically correct choice, receiving subsidies of $7,500 for a $40,000 Chevy Volt or a $36,000 Nissan Leaf. Buyers of Toyota’s $32,000 Prius plug-in get a $2,500 tax credit — and purchasers of Ford’s $33,000 C-Max Energi plug-in get $3,750. But sales for both the Volt and Leaf lagged last month, moving Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn to warn that more subsidies are necessary to keep sales numbers up (to put hybrid-electric sales in perspective, their 40,000 vehicle sales in November was 16,000 fewer than sales of the Ford F-150 pickup alone).
The increase in hybrid-electric sales came with the continued rebound of U.S. auto sales — now at their highest levels since 2007.
The bad news for greens is that the industry’s revival is coming on the backs of more-profitable trucks, with SUV sales making up a majority of the market at 50.6 percent. Greens have quietly cheered the Great Recession which brought lower carbon emissions — in part because cost-conscious auto buyers took refuge in fuel-sipping econo-boxes (sedan sales in 2007 significantly outpaced SUV sales).
“If ‘business as usual’ conditions continue, economic contractions the size of the Great Recession or even bigger will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO2,” warned Tapia Granados, a researcher for the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, in a study this May.
President Obama says that global warming is “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.” But to fight it, he will paradoxically need continued tax breaks for the wealthy — the target of his 2012 class-warfare campaign and his fiscal-cliff negotiating stance.
Obama giveth, and Obama taketh away.