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Payne: Romney-Ryan echo Snyder-Calley
Posted by hpayne on August 11, 2012
Businessman Mitt Romney’s inspired pick of Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate is once againanuncanny replay of successful businessman Rick Snyder’s campaign for Michigan governor in 2010.
A venture capitalist and ex-Gateway CEO, Snyder chose young ex-banker and ex-vice GOP chair of the Michigan House Tax Policy Committee Brian Calley as his lieutenant governor, and in doing so indicated a Snyder administration that was all business – serious about getting Michigan’s fiscal house in order. It was a glaring contrast to the chaotic, activist years of Governor Jennifer Granholm, who lurched from budget crisis to budget crisis while transferring millions of dollars to her rich green cronies for alternative-energy projects.
Sound familiar?
The AP had its typically political takeon the announcement, speculating that Ryan is Romney’s conservative bone for the GOP base. But the MSM fails to understand that, like Snyder, Romney is a businessman who sees the federal government as a turnaround job. Ryan, like Calley for Snyder, is his legislative liaison and COO.
Romney and Ryan are — true to the Bain Capital founder’s private-equity roots — auditioning as CEO and COO of a federal government in need of fixing, just as Ardesta Capital founder Snyder and Calley have been CEO and COO to Michigan’s dramatic fiscal turnaround.
The Ryan choice signals Romney’s focus on the nation’s economic emergency, which is on course not just for the worst economic recovery in post-WWII history, but also for a European-style debt crisis. Ryan also signals that Romney is not timid about making the hard choices: The House Budget Committee chair’s plan is an unblinking effort to take on essential entitlement and tax reform.
Of course, Obama will demagogue Romney-Ryan as heartless, outsourcing-to-China Scrooges out to take away grandma’s Medicare. It is the same playbook Democrats used against Snyder in the 2010 governor’s race. But like Snyder, Romney and Ryan are likeable, patient pros who eschew divisive rhetoric because they want to get things done. And just as Ryan signals Romney’s comfort with a younger generation of reformers, so too did Snyder’s pick reach into the bench of young-gun talent in the Michigan Republican party.
I told you the similarities are uncanny.
Two years after Snyder-Calley were elected, the personal, mean-spirited attacks on his success seem irrelevant to the remarkable turnaround One Tough Nerd has delivered for the state. Romney and Ryan promise the same serious leadership for America — if only voters can hear them over the vicious attacks that are coming from Obama and his media henchmen.
Payne: McCotter McBomb
Posted by hpayne on August 9, 2012
“I put this in McCotter’s lap,” said Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette in an interview today with The Detroit News after indicting four of Thaddeus McCotter’s staff ” but not the boss himself ” for ballot fraud.
Schuette might as well have been talking about the bomb the McCotter McScandal set off in the 11th District, a once guaranteed GOP seat that is now a circus of write-in campaigns, Krazy Kerry, fratricidal GOP politics, and expensive special elections.
This was a bomb that had been ticking for some time.
“This probably happened in the past,” continued Schuette. “We see a pattern of this activity from 2006 to 2009,” he said referring to evidence his office uncovered of the same McCotter staffers altering ballot signatures for years. McCotter’s luck simply ran out. He finally got caught by an alert Secretary of State staffer who saw something amiss.
Boom.
Only Kerry Bentivolio was left standing – an accidental candidate who is a deer in the headlights one minute and hiding from the press the next. Having tried to destroy him as Krazy Kerry in the priamry, Republicans now must put in the Extreme Makeover chair, teach him to talk like Jimmy Stewart, and cast him as “Mr. B goes to Washington.” Thanks, Thad.
Schuette’s news on Bentivolio was the only good news. Rumors had swirled in GOP circles Wednesday that his campaign had paid off McCotter’s Deputy District Director Don Yowchuang (who was deep in debt, the story goes) to sabotage the ballot signatures, thus vaulting Kerry to the Promised Land. But Schuette’s team found no evidence. Remember, The Three Stooges (McCotter, Yowchuang, and District Director Paul Seewald.) had been allegedly doing this for years.
McCotter displayed an “attitude of indifference,” says a clearly annoyed Schuette, a Republican himself. “I’m appalled at his approach. This was an office culture of ‘I don’t care.’ He stiffed everyone in his district.”
“They thought they were above the law.”
Kind of like Barack Obama and gutting welfare workfare. Like John Conyers abusing his office for day care and government cars. Like the Fast and Furious stonewalling of the Terry family. Like Kwame Kilpatrick. McCotter is another cautionary tale of government incompetence.
So how come we keep giving Washington more power?
Payne: Election dog days
Posted by hpayne on August 8, 2012
America is suffering through its worst economic recovery since WW2, debt at European levels of 70 percent of GDP, Washington health care reform running up medical costs, businesses not hiring for fear of Obamacare and looming taxes on investment – and U.S. bonds have been downgraded for the first time in U.S. history.
So on Tuesday, just 20 percent of Michiganians showed up at the polls to send the same crowd back to Washington.
August primaries traditionally turn out light numbers – but the truth is that (perversely) most elections are now decided in August thanks to partisan redistricting. In Metro Detroit, for example, the lines have been drawn to such partisan precision that no district is considered a bipartisan tossup. (Due to the outrageous antics of GOP Rep. Thad McCotter, only the 11th may be up for grabs if only because there are doubts about the competence of Krazy Kerry Bentivolio.)
In the last four years, the US has transferred unprecedented power – most significantly the U.S health care system – to 535 Washington politicians. And yet those elected officials are less equipped than ever to wield such responsibility. Two examples from Tuesday’s primary: Gary Peters and John Conyers.
Peters won the Democratic 14th District Tuesday after being the only major Michigan pol to march with the radical Occupy Detroit last fall. Peters sported a “I am the 99 Percent” button despite being a millionaire former Merrill Lynch financial manager. A caricature of the fork-tongued pol, Peters was against letting the Bush tax cuts expire before he was for it. This complete 180 took place in just one election cycle and despite a worsening economic outlook.
Next door in the 13th District, John Conyers won apparently because his name is John Conyers. Despite a run of ethics embarrassments (not including his ethically-challenged wife Monica), he has served Detroit for 48 years. How effective has he been? Have you driven through Detroit lately?
To such talents have Michiganians voted incumbency for life and control over its health care and energy resources. Well, just 20 percent of Michiganians that is.
Payne: It’s Pete Spend-it-not vs. Debbie I-can-feel-global-warming-when-I-fly
Posted by hpayne on August 7, 2012
Pete Hoekstra’s chief opponent, Clark Durant, attacked the ex-businessman from Holland as a professional pol who had spent years in Washington, on the campaign trail, and on K Street.
But the public eye has its advantages.
Hoekstra’s time in the Congressional limelight and a near-successful gubernatorial run in 2010 gave him overwhelming name recognition over the Cornerstone Schools’ CEO. Pete won going away, 54-34 percent (with 86 percent of the vote counted in Tuesday’s primary).
Based on Mark Brewer’s extraordinary attacks on Durant in recent days, it looks like Democrats got who they wanted. But with failing poll numbers, a vote for Obama’s Obamacare tax hike, and a vote against the job-creating Keystone Pipeline, Debbie “I Feel Global Warming When I Fly” Stabenow looks vulnerable no matter who is the challenger.
In his acceptance speech, Hoekstra wasted no time in jabbing at Debbie’s soft spot: Barack Obama.
“We can do a whole lot better,” he declared, linking Debbie to Obama’s disastrous “you didn’t build that” speech as well as playing marionette to Obama’s puppeteer in voting against the jobs-creating, gas price-deflating Keystone Pipeline. She’s the “Follower-in-Chief” said Hoekstra in coining a phrase sure to haunt Stabenow.
He also slammed Stabenow for her blind support of the Obamacare mandate, now defined as a tax by the Supreme Court. “The first people they hire is IRA agents, not health care providers,” he said.
As Obama goes, so goes Debbie.
And if Stabenow has Obama, then Hoekstra is determined to show Michigan that he is on board with Governor Snyder. “(Voters) have seen what Governor Snyder has done to deliver results,” added Pete. While trouncing Durant, Hoekstra also thanked him for making his campaign tougher. Indeed, Durant’s bulldog attacks on Durant’s head-scratching Super Bowl ad are sure to have toughened a Hoekstra campaign that lurched out of the starting blocks.
The Senate is a key piece of the Romney strategy to overturn Obamacare, which will not only bankrupt the U.S. Treasury over time, but will set back American health care for generations to come. For three years, Stabenow’s Senate has not only failed to pass a budget to thwart trillion-dollar deficits – but it has acted as a roadblock to every piece of reform legislation out of the Republican House.
Michigan is Ground Zero in the fight to take back the Senate. Pete vs. Debbie is on.
Payne: The resurrection of Fred Upton
Posted by hpayne on August 6, 2012
“I think good performace should be rewarded,” says Myron Ebell, director of Freedom Action, in endorsing Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, for Congress this year.
Those are extraordinary words coming from one of Upton’s most vocal conservative critics two years ago – and a hopeful sign in these cynical times that politicians really can learn from their mistakes.
Ebell, a smart, longtime Washington warrior against the Big Government Leviathan, has been outspoken in his support of Upton this year as the House Energy and Commerce Chairman seeks election to a 14th term. “As committee chairman, he has been a crucial point man against Obamacare and the EPA’s power grabs,” Ebell told me last week.
Fred Upton? Really? Really.
Upton was the bane of conservatives everywhere in 2010 when it came to light that he had co-sponsored during Nancy Pelosi’s 2007 Congress stealth legislation that would outlaw the common household light bulb on January 1, 2012. Lost in the wilderness and playing to the Beltway Media, President “We Are Addicted to Oil” Bush – and surrogates like Upton – were singing from the Green Church hymnal in decrying light bulbs for destroying the planet. The legislation earned Upton scorn as the prototypical, squishy Beltway GOPer.
Along with throwing Obamacare overboard, ditching the bulb ban became a battle cry of the grass roots Tea Party movement in 2010. Barack Obama had lived up to his “change” promise to re-colonize America as an over-regulated outpost of European Market Socialism. A mobilized electorate wanted America back.
Upton not only heard the battle cry, but repented for his past wrongs. To prove the point, he asked Republicans to make him general of the very division that would overturn Obamacare and his own bulb ban: The Energy and Commerce Committee. As general he has been a relentless voice against the Obama agenda. From Obamacare to the Keystone pipeline to Solyndra to, yes, the bulb ban.
Last December, Upton’s deft legislative maneuver short-circuited the EPA from turning the lights out on the incandescent bulb.
“It’s a milestone for personal freedom,” said Ebell at the time. “This is a significant reversal of Nanny State regulations. Maybe this is a turning of the tide.”
Upton hasn’t convinced everyone that he has changed his spots – conservative veteran Jack Hoogendyk has challenged him in the primary again this year. But polls on election eve show Hoogendyk losing by even greater margins than his 57-43 loss in 2010. Having Upton at the helm of the Energy Committee, says Ebell, is a crucial plus not just for Michigan – but for an incoming Romney administration which needs tested officers on the ground who can move quickly to roll back the Obama bureaucracy that is overrunning the country.
Payne: Obama’s Opel future
Posted by hpayne on August 2, 2012
Barack Obama touts General Motors as his success story. But this week’s news of a 41 percent drop in profits tells another tale.
The General rightly pointed out that its European Opel division dragged the company’s numbers down while its U.S. and Chinese units continued to post strong numbers. But this should hardly come as comfort for Americans as the Obama Administration’s goal is to make America more like Europe.
That is, Opel is suffering because it is a victim of anti-business, Obama-like policies in Western Europe.
Opel reported an operating loss of $361 million in the face of a deepening European debt crisis that is a harbinger of Obama’s own mounting debt crisis – now running upwards of 70 percent of GDP and piling up trillion dollar annual deficits. With debt dragging European nations into another recession, Opel faces a difficult restructuring made more perilous by powerful European unions that predict Obama’s Big Labor vision for America. With union rules and regulations embedded in Europe’s laws, GM has been unable to close a plant in Europe since World War 2 – despite red ink-gushing excess capacity.
And don’t forget an economy run by the Green Church. With gas prices at a stratospheric $8 a gallon (“Somehow,” Obama Energy guru Steven Chu once famously said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”), profit margins are tight for Euro-automakers. Furthermore, they are straining under Europe’s own version of CAFE regulations that impose strict CO2 emissions limitations.
In North America, GM reported an operating profit of nearly $2 billion. But there are signs that the US economy is slowing too – a result of Obama’s Euro-like regulatory and tax policies. Sales at both GM and Ford fell in the month of July as the manufacturing sector faltered. Companies continue to sit on cash and resist hiring for fear of the costs of Obamacare and the January tax cliff.
That’s the European way. Is Opel is the future of American industry?
Payne: Where’s Bentivolio?
Posted by hpayne on August 1, 2012
Bloomfield Township– Can Kerry Bentivolio win the 11th District nomination by going underground?
Thad McCotter’s sudden resignation from Congress this summer scrambled the 11th district primary – and Michigan’s strangest race has only gotten stranger without him. With McCotter McGone, the Michigan GOP drafted former state Senator Nancy Cassis out of concern that the only remaining candidate on the ballot – Ron Paul disciple Bentivolio – wasn’t ready for prime time.
The party’s concerns apparently were well founded.
On paper, Bentivolio’s citizen-candidate resume intrigues with stints as teacher, entrepreneur, and soldier (Vietnam and Iraq) on his resume. However, with growing evidence that he is well downriver of the mainstream, Bentivolio has gone silent before the August 7 primary, refusing media interviews – and even refusing repeated party invitations to speak at routine candidate forums. Republicans have invited him to two such occasions in recent weeks in Wayne and Oakland counties – including Wednesday night in Bloomfield Township. But Bentivolio has been a no-show.
His strategy appears to be silence and a TV ad – and the mathematical calculation that most folks will automatically check his name as the only Republican. Then, perhaps, he can solidify GOPers in a general election about Barack Obama.
Cassis supporters admit that their write-in candidate’s chances are difficult despite a savvy campaign, wall-to-wall ads, and a new EPIC MRA poll showing Cassis with a 51-38 edge among likely voters. The problem? Those voters must have the presence of mind to write in ol’ what’s-her-name in the blank space under Bentivolio’s name next Tuesday.
Meanwhile, election watchers say Bentiviolio may automatically get 30 percent of the vote. Add that number to perhaps 25 percent of ballots that have already voted absentee for Bentivolio (though absentees can always change their vote) and the Libertarian has his formula for success.
But in the general, a Bentivolio candidacy could spell disaster for a Republican Party that banks on the 11th.
Before Bentivolio became the GOP’s post-McCotter default, he was known among Republicans as the nutty Ron Paul guy who read from the Constitution at lightly-attended GOP forums. Since becoming the frontrunner, however, his antics aren’t taken so lightly.
Especially the bizarre, feature length 2011 movie, “The President Goes to Heaven,” in which Bentivolio has a prominent role as a doctor tending to a fictional President Dubya Bush character. The plot of the movie? That Bush plotted 9-11 (referred to as 1-11 in the film which is available on Amazon) as an excuse to invade Iraq (a war Paul acolytes detested) to finish what his father had started. But, goes the plot, the president cannot get into heaven until he admits his crime – and converts to Islam.
We’re not making this up.
“Twenty five thousand people (dead) is a small price to pay for a second Peal Harbor,” says the Bush character in explaining why he authorized the destruction of the twin towers. “I will apologize for 1-11 and the wars. I apologize for what I did. Only Dick knew the details.” (Dick being an obvious reference to Dick Cheney.)
No doubt concerned that Bentivolio would be bombarded by questions about “Heaven” should he ever surface, the candidate’s campaign has refused repeated interview requests from The Michigan View.com – and other media.
His only public sighting has been an 11th District picnic last weekend in which he mingled with the 30 people in attendance – but otherwise refrained from public comments.
Cassis has been relentless in a well-funded ad campaign designed not only to make her a household name (“Nothing fancy. Write in Nancy” goes the jingle) – but also to explain to voters why they must first pass over “Krazy Kerry” Bentivolio.
“There’s no accident he is not here tonight,” she said Wednesday in Bloomfield before rattling off her own conservative credentials – and conservative backers from Patterson to Rogers . “You need to know how bizarre (this film) is. The content alone raises questions about his judgment.”
Cassis’ campaign is an uphill climb. But if Bentivolio’s strategy works, it will be an easier downhill glide for his Democratic opponent towards stealing a seat that just months ago was thought to be a GOP lock.
Payne: Durant gets slimed
Posted by hpayne on August 1, 2012
Payne: Durant gets slimed
Henry Payne/ The Michigan View.com
The American political system’s War on Success added admired Detroit businessman Clark Durant’s head to its target list this week as both Democratic Party Chief Heavy Mark Brewer and Durant’s Senate rival piled on Durant for. . . the pay he receives as founder of Detroit’s Cornerstone Schools.
We’re not making this up. Build one of America’s most admired private equity firms and get smeared as a “vulture capitalist.” Pioneer charter school choice for the worst public school district in America and get sued as a tax cheat.
Is it any wonder Americans loath politics?
The Durant attack by Brewer/Hoekstra follows the pattern of the Gingrich/Obama tag team on Mitt Romney: Mudball your opponent with cheap appeals to envy. Never mind that Durant’s Cornerstone Schools have led a revolution in helping Detroit schoolchildren escape Motown’s nightmare. Never mind that he is a fundraising machine for Cornerstone, raising tens of millions of dollars to expand an education model that graduated a remarkable 95 percent of its inner city students from high school.
Class warfare has become a tired Democratic refrain. But Brewer’s over-the-top. Durant’s-pay-is-illegal hunting expedition of a GOP opponent running IN SECOND PLACE in the Republican primary is a telling comment on how much Democrats fear a Durant campaign against Debbie “I feel global warming when I fly” Stabenow.
Meanwhile, the growing Republican instinct to eat their own is plenty troubling as well. Where two candidates – Durant and Hoekstra – are similar in their political philosophies, apparently all that’s left is to destroy each other personally. Maybe Durant “started it” by unfairly smeared Hoekstra as a “birther” earlier this spring. There is clearly no love lost between the two men. And so into the mud they go.
But Hoekstra’s taking up Brewer’s class-warfare line against Durant smacks of the much-maligned tactics of Newt Gingrich against frontrunner Mitt Romney in party primaries. Except that Hoekstra is the front-runner, not Durant. And how does class warfare resonate with the GOP primary base exactly?
Durant is well paid for his efforts because two of Detroit’s selfless philanthropists, Bill Pulte and Bruce Becker, think he’s worth it. That’s a crime?
Election 2012 is a critical crossroads for a Senate that has failed to pass a budget in three years, has passed ruinous Obamacare legislation, and that is standing by while the Obama administration destroys entire industries by regulatory fiat. Yet one week before primary day, the conversation is about whether one of Detroit’s most successful businessman makes a lot of money.
Payne: Indispensable Friedman
Posted by hpayne on July 31, 2012
(This article is adapted from a speech Michigan View.com editor Henry Payne gave Tuesday at a joint Northwood University-Mackinac Center forum celebrating 100 years of Milton Friedman.)
You know who Steve Jobs is – not to mention the iPhone, iPod, iPad. You may also know his Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak
But do you know who Mike Markkula is?
Wozniak will tell you that Mike Markkula is the most important man in Apple’s history after Steve Jobs. Indeed, you may never have heard of the two Steves were it not for Markkula. Why? Because the California One Percenter was Apple Computer’s first investor waaaay back in 1977. He gave $250,000 to two poor, struggling, 99 Percent entrepreneurs working out of a garage so that they had the capital necessary to build computers. Mike Markkula is the capitalism behind Apple Computers.
There are thousands of Mike Markkulas out there – individual investors, small banks, big banks, small private equity firms like Detroit’s Huron Capital, big private equity firms like Boston’s Bain Capital, all looking for the next big thing that will better serve America’s consumers.
They are all capitalists. And they are Milton Friedman’s heroes.
July 31 would have been Friedman’s 100th birthday. There is never a bad time to honor the free market’s greatest champion and the fundamentals of what have become known as classical economics. But now is a particularly good time because, for the last four years, the current crowd in the White House has pursued the antithesis of Friedmanomics – market socialism.
President Obama’s market socialist model believes that government drives growth – that government officials like himself know the future. The model stipulates that a handful of government bureaucrats are a better substitute for the thousands of capitalists in their messy, competitive pursuit for the next great product. If you are as smart as Barack Obama – and you already know what the future is – then why shouldn’t government go all in for it? Why leave the field to the chance that vulture capitalists will put their money on the wrong garage hippies?
After all, recognized entrepreneurs like Henrik Fisker already have electric cars like the Fisker Nina ready to go. Ready to save the planet from global warming. So what if he can’t find capital in the private market? Barack Obama understands his vision.
And so Obama took some $60 billion in taxpayer money in 2009 and bet it all on green energy companies like Fisker Automotive.
He did this despite the fact that most economists today recognize that Milton Friedman was right- market socialism is a failure.
Sure enough, most of the companies that got millions from Uncle Barack have gone belly-up or suffered huge loses because there is no consumer market for their products: Solyndra, Ener1, Beacon Power, A123 Systems, Evergreen, Fisker, and so on. Obama compounded his error by spending another $700 million on other projects while reforming the health care system to be government run. The result has been the worst U.S. economic recovery out of a recession since World War 2.
By a lot.
But if this was such a predictable failure, why did Barack Obama pursue the economics of the past?
I spoke recently with Pat Anderson, on of Michigan’s top economists, and asked him when the economics profession had arrived at a consensus that Friedman was right. Pat said the consensus for free markets hardened in the let 20th century after the failures of Russian socialism, European market Socialism, and the failure of Big Government spending in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s – putting the U.S. in such a big hole economically that only the timely free market economics of the Reagan administration could save it.
And who was one of Reagan’s key economic advisors? Milton Friedman.
Still the question lingers: Why did Obama enact failure? Because we continue to live the eternal human struggle: Government vs. the individual. The state vs. the consumer. There will always be institutions vested in promoting Big Government. Politicians promote government because it gives them more power. Individual companies/industries – like Fisker – want more government to tilt the playing field in their favor.
And then there is America’s mainstream media – always eager to provide a megaphone for Big Government pols like Barack Obama.
Milton Friedman understood the power of media. He knew that free market capitalism is the most successful system in the history of the world. He knew why the United States was the most prosperous nation on earth. But he also knew that unless Americans understood the concept of economic liberty – they would lose it.
So this balding, 5′-tall man became an unlikely media celebrity in order to celebrate the free market.
He had a weekly column in liberal Newsweek magazine from 1966-1984. He produced a 10-part PBS series on the government-run, liberal network called “Free to choose.” He wrote countless articles in popular publications and made countless appearances on popular liberal programs like Phil Donahue to spread the word.
His media legacy lives today. Even without Friedman around, there is a media revolution that communicates economic freedom louder than ever. Thanks to Internet entrepreneurs and their investors, Americans have access to a wider range of media than ever. The Internet has broken the monopoly of the pro-government network media and large newspapers (a monopoly Friedman battled all his life). Today, media like The Michigan View.com, Mackinac’s Capitol Confidential, The Drudge Report, National Review Online, The Daily Caller, and Fox News communicate the importance of free market economics.
Happy birthday, Milton Friedman.
Payne: Biden puts unions first, students second
Posted by hpayne on July 30, 2012
Detroit– Joe Biden came to Detroit Sunday to applaud the good work of teachers unions in the city with the worst public school system in America. The irony, apparently was lost on the vice president.
Indeed, Biden spoke very little about students at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Cobo Center. For the Democratic party, education is about the unions, not the kids.
“Don’t tell me (Republicans) value educators and pay them so little,” Biden roared. “Unlike our Republican friends, we don’t see you as the problem. We see you as the solution.”
Yet, in a Detroit school system that is hemorrhaging kids to charters and the suburbs, the teachers are clearly party of the problem. After all, the American Federation of Teachers has a monopoly on teachers in the Detroit and Highland Park school systems. In Detroit’s rapidly expanding charter schools, there are no unions – and a recent Mackinac Center study found that charter students outperform their public school peers. Meanwhile, Highland park schools – despite (attention, Mr. Biden) getting more money per pupil than any other district in the state – made national headlines last week when the ACLU sued the district for failing to teach students to read.
But the Obama-Biden ticket isn’t about winning more for kids, it’s about winning more for teacher unions. Cobo was packed with teachers wearing Obama-Biden in 20102 t-shirts. “On the stage, an older delegate waved her walker over her head. She then attached one of the omnipresent Obama campaign signs to the end of the stick before swinging it again,” reported The Detroit News.
“It’s you, who keep class sizes down. It’s you, who take money out of your pocket to help kids,” Biden applauded. Actually, he has it wrong. Teachers benefits are so outrageous that they are a burden on districts like Detroit, robbing resources from the classroom.
Meanwhile, its s Republicans that are obsessed with student achievement – lifting the charter cap on schools, pushing for more school choice for kids, and demanding teacher benefits reform that brings benefits in line with the private sector .
Biden insisted that GOPers care more about tax breaks for the rich than about education, but the evidence is overwhelming in cities like Detroit that Republicans are at the forefront of education reform. Interestingly, the Obama Administration supports many of the GOP-proven reforms like charter schools and evaluations with testing and merit pay. But Biden never once mentioned any of them in his speech.
Why? Because the AFT opposes all these reforms.
Payne: Rep. Gary Flipflop
Posted by hpayne on July 26, 2012
Mitt Romney has a reputation as a flip-flopper, but Michigan Rep. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township-for-now, has perfected the art.
The 9th district Oakland County representative running for the new 14th District Democratic nomination in Detroit told the Detroit News editorial board this week that running in a more urban, liberal district hasn’t changed his message one bit. But the devil is in the flip-flops.
Running against conservative GOPer Rocky Raczkowski in the 2010 Congressional campaign, Peters took an aggressive stance against spending and bucked President Obama on his calls for another $50 billion ins stimulus money. He fashioned himself a champion of small business. Most notably, he opposed Obama’s plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire on taxpayers making over $250,000.
What a difference two years makes.
Today, Peters supports President Obama’s new, $450 million second stimulus gusher which makes the $50 mil proposal look like a small leak. And while the small business lobby, the National Federation for Independent Business, this year was the lead plaintiff in the historic Supreme Court suit against Obamacare’s individual mandate, Peters says he supports the bill.
And those Bush tax cuts? Peters now supports Obama’s call to end them for higher income earners (many of them small business owners). The only Michigan congressman to march with Occupy Detroit last fall, Peters sported a “We are the 99 Percent” button as he marched alongside his new union and activist friends in the very liberal 14th district.
Peters, a millionaire former financial advisor with Merril Lynch, wants to be whatever you want hi to be. It’s also a commentary on the Democratic field that Peters is the most qualified candidate for the job.
Payne: Democrats’ Big Nurse bullies
Posted by hpayne on July 24, 2012
Pity the poor hard working teacher. Teaching was once of the most honored and respected professions in America. Then along came the NEA and the MEA and decades of hard-knuckle, Big Labor, bullying behavior that would make a loan shark-enforcer blush, you have what we have today: a profession all but embarrassed by the behavior of its unions and the pitiful performance metrics that result from the centrally-controlled monopoly it has imposed. Under union dominance the profession has suffered a loss of self-esteem, public confidence, and respect.
Now another great profession is in danger of following suit: Nursing. And Michigan Representative Lesia Liss – a Warren Democrat who also happens to be an emergency room nurse – has the scars to prove it.
In most people’s minds the nurse is a care giver, a comforter, a professional dedicated to the health and well being of the patients they serve. But if the union equivalent of the MEA for nurses, the Michigan Nurses Association (MNA), has its way, all that is about to change.
Turning on one of their own for having a difference of opinion, the MNA has unleashed a barrage of attacks and gutter tactics against the second-term Democrat that make the MEA playbook look like amateur hour. It all started when Liss had the gall to cross her party and vote in favor of an abortion limitation bill (for the record, this writer is pro-choice). Worse – from the MNA’s perspective – she also referred to the immature and vulgar “vagina monologue” hissy fit of fellow House Democrats Lisa Brown and Barb Byrum as “a circus.” Which it was – a fact obscured by the silly overreaction of the GOP majority.
Liss’s crime? Bipartisanship.
“They say I’m too friendly with Republicans,” says Liss about here abortion heresy. She points to one ad running against here that pictures her next to Rick Snyder. “The GOP has a friend in Lesia Liss,” reads the caption.
“The ability to work with the other side should be a strength,” says Liss. “When I ran for office, people demanded that legislators get along. I promised to work across the aisle. So why are the unions against me so aggressively?”
To make the point that all nurses better agree with the MRN union position on issues – or shut up – the MRN has joined activist groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the League of Conservation Voters to support her opponent in an open seat primary resulting from new district maps. The MRN then launched a series of robocalls and mailers in the new district claiming that Liss has been “bought and paid for” by special interests. Apparently towing the MRN labor union line is exempt from any “special interest” taint.
The MRN is also telling all its members that Liss has “betrayed her profession.” Liss sees it differently. She says nursing should be about saving all lives.
The Party’s other union enforcers are punishing Liss for here heresy as well. The UAW and MEA have joined the MEA in backing Liss’s Democratic primary opponent, Jon Switalski. This despite their endorsement of Liss in her two previous elections – and the fact that BOTH of Liss’s parents are UAW members.
The official MNA line is that they are supporting Switalski because he introduced a liberal bill regulating hospital nurse-to-patent ratios. Trouble is, that is a bill that Nurse Liss originally introduced back when Democrats controlled the House two years ago. Its Big Government remedy failed even then. Switalski’s adoption is merely the cover story for the MNA to abandon one of its own to enforce Party abortion doctrine.
The Party line must be enforced. Pity bipartisanship. And pity the poor hard working nurse.
Payne: The ignored victims of Fast and Furious
Posted by hpayne on July 23, 2012
Fortunately, the guns James Holmes used in his Batman spree weren’t acquired via Operation Fast and Furious. Then Aurora’s victims might never get answers to what really happened.
President Obama’s visit to the Denver area Sunday was touching – in stark contrast to the back of the hand that his administration has given the Michigan family of slain border agent, 40-year old Brian Terry.
Terry was killed 18 months ago by members of Mexican drug thugs armed with guns that had disappeared in the botched in the ATF’s botched gun sting. The Obama Administration has reacted to this tragedy by stonewalling a Congressional investigation – ultimately resulting in a Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt by Congress last month.
Terry was a Flat Rock, Michigan native – and his family has never received a visit from President Obama for the loss of her son, though he did make a phone call at their son’s funeral. Terry’s mother “recalled receiving only one mailed letter from the attorney general’s office following her son’s death and a few other letters sent as email attachments once Fast and Furious was revealed on TV — no personal phone calls or visits,”reports Fox News.
TheMSM has also covered up for the administration, devoting little coverage to the story and not once interviewing the family – again in stark contrast to the dozens of reporters who have flown live to Aurora, Colorado to report and interview family victims of the Holmes’ massacre. Only Fox News Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have done interviews with the Terrys.
“They’re lying and hiding something,” Terry’s father, Ken, told Hannity.
Snubbed by the Obama administration, the Terry family has been left to get information about their son’s death from media reports. “Is this arrogance or incompetence?” asks Robert Heyer, Terry’s cousin who appeared on the O’Reily program with Terry’s mother. “Sometimes I’m not sure what, but we’re very disappointed. It has been 18 months, and we still don’t have the answer.”
And the Terry’s own congressman, John Dingell? “He has never spoken to the Terry family,” they say.
From Gabby Giffords shooting to the Aurora massacre, gun violence has offered a public forum for Democrats to demand gun control and accountability. Except when the violence was the direct result of the federal government’s own gun operation. Then is must be ignored at all costs lest it embarrass the untouchable Barack Obama.
Payne: Could gun laws have stopped him?
Posted by hpayne on July 22, 2012
That didn’t take long. Within hours of the James Holmes’ Batman massacre, the usual suspects were calling for restrictions on America’s Bill of Rights.
“There are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop,” said billionaire New York dictator Michael Bloomberg who has been choking New Yorkers’ civil liberties with everything from soda bans to salt diet restrictions.
“Given what has happened today, do you think there is now legitimate cause to press politicians for tougher gun control in America?” raged British-transplant and CNN talk show host Piers Morgan who favors harsher gun restrictions as in his native country. But neither does Mother England have a Bill of Rights – a detail that, ahem, inspired America.
America is horrified at Holmes’ violence. It is horrified at Detroit’s violence. We all weep for the victims. But is a ban on guns the solution? Do Bloomberg and Morgan honestly believe that by gutting the Second Amendment, the First Amendment would not suffer as well? Do they think they can pick and choose our civil liberties?
Besides, the idea that the rest of the world is free of guns is nonsense. Britain and, closer to home, Canada (which has suffered two similar public shootings in Toronto this summer), have much tougher gun laws than the U.S. – but guns are still plenty prevalent and Canada is currently trying to loosen its gun restrictions to accommodate sportsmen. Despite a raft of new gun laws in the 1980s and 1990s, gun crime has increased in England, according to the British Journal of Criminology.
The culture of violence in more homogenous nation-states like Britain and Canada is historically lower than the U.S. – even before gun laws. Meanwhile, Americans are much freer thanks to their own history of Constitutional civil liberties.
Like anti-immigration activists (round up 11 million illegals and deport them!) or global warming fanatics (stop CO2 increases!), the gun-ban lobby traffics in knee-jerk “this must stop” rhetoric while ignoring market realities. America, after all, is not without gun control laws over its estimated 200 million guns – none of which stopped James Holmes from acquiring what he needed to commit a despicable, criminal act.
– Colorado gun control: Like all states, Colorado lives under the federal 1994 Brady Law – enacted in the wake of President Reagan’s shooting and requiring a background check on gun purchasers. Holmes, with a clean criminal record, apparently passed these required checks. In the wake of the 1999 Columbine massacre, Colorado voters reacted with more gun control, passing a constitutional amendment requiring background checks before purchasing firearms at a gun show.
– Gun availability: Gun control advocates point out that under the federal assault weapons ban that sun-setted in 2004, Holmes would not have been able to purchase his AR-15 assault weapon. Not exactly. Manufacturers simply replaced the AR-15 with something called the XM-15 that circumvented the law’s barrel threading and bayonet mounting language.
Where there’s a market there is a way. So what to do?
I am in favor of gun control. As a licensed race-car driver of fiberglass missiles that can reach 180 mph, I strongly advocate the licensing and safe use of potentially deadly products. In the case of race cars, that means extensive training (as is required for a Michigan concealed carry license, for example). In the case of guns, licensing and laws limiting clip sizes are practical and doable.
“I don’t see any constitutional bar to regulating high-capacity magazines,” says libertarian Cato Institute scholar Robert Levy in support of a 10-round clip limit that would have reduced the lethal abilities of, for example, Holmes’ AR-15. “The Second Amendment is not absolute. (A clip law)may stop a few of these looney tunes.”
These are sensible responses – unlike the unworkable ban hysteria of Bloomberg and Morgan.
Because when their civil liberty ban fails, activists like them will simply move on through the gaping hole in America’s Bill of Rights to restrict more rights. Holmes (and the Columbine teens) were fans of violent movies? Ban them. Holmes reportedly marinated himself in violent, online role-player video games? Ban video games.
James Holmes was hell-bent on putting people in danger. Without a AR-15, he could have done it with a pistol. Without a pistol, a shotgun. By refusing clear-eyed solutions to what really deter psychopaths, America’s policymakers are hell-bent on putting the civil liberties of millions in danger.
Payne: CO2 reductions good for nothing
Posted by hpayne on July 18, 2012
“What the government has not mandated, the economy is doing on its own: emissions of global warming gases in the United States are down,” thrills New York Times’ reporter Matthew Wald. “In part, the Great Recession has been good for something.”
Good for what?
The Green Church and has long advised the importance of economic sacrifice to heal the planet ” and yet despite seven years of declining U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, its media disciples are still complaining this summer of hot temperatures. “Experts say it’s difficult to prove a causal relationship between climate change and last week’s wild weather in Michigan, but record temperatures and violent storms appear to fit the widely-accepted scientific model,” worried MLive’s liberal Jonathan Oosting this July.
Clearly the draconian six percent decrease in U.S. CO2 emissions since 2005 has been good for nothing. Despite the most wrenching economic downturn since the Great Depression – costing millions of jobs and destroying thousands of businesses – emissions reductions have had zero effect on the climate.
The dirty (pun intended) secret of the green agenda is that even harsher economic measures will make no difference either.
You thought the economy has been bad since 2005? President Obama and his media allies want 80 percent more in CO2 reductions by 2050. That’s an economy-strangling 20 percent per decade – over three times the retraction from the Great Recession. For four more decades. Yet, scientists concede, the millions more in unemployed people and the billions more in subsidies for boondoggles like Solyndras and Beacon Powers will do NOTHING to reduce global temperatures (even if one believes in climate science after the devastating Climategate scandal).
Why? Because the CO2 emissions of the rest of the world ” up 3 percent in 2011 and 9 and 8 percent respectively in the rapidly-growing behemoths of China and India – will continue to rise. Veteran climatologist Patrick Michaels points out that – according to the U.N.’s own climate models – cutting GLOBAL carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 would only reduce predicted temps by 7 percent.
Global economic devastation for a mere 7 percent. Clearly, the solution is worse than the disease.
In assessing The New York Times “good news” of the Great Recession, U.S. Energy Information Administration official Howard Gruenspecht found some “bad news.” That is, that U.S. CO2 emissions have increased since the recession ended. “The 3.9 percent increase in emissions in 2010 was primarily driven by the rebound from the economic downturn experienced in 2008 and 2009,” he lamented.
Bad news? Better that a richer world endure inevitable temperatures with First World air conditioning than a poorer world that suffers inevitable temperatures in Third World shanties.
Payne: Henry Ford, not so smart?
Posted by hpayne on July 17, 2012
“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” said Barack Obama about American entrepreneurs over the weekend. “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”
Hear that, Henry Ford?
You’re not so smart. You were nothing special. Without our government-built road system, without government regulation of driver’s licenses, you’re nothing. In fact, the city of Highland Park is as responsible for Ford’s success as you.
But Obama’s socialist mindset has it exactly backwards. Ford’s unique vision and leadership drive created the affordable, assembly-line produced auto. Which in turn opened up whole new frontiers of travel – like weekends in Traverse City and Holland. So government, funded by the billions in tax revenue coming from Ford Motor Company, helped build the infrastructure to service Henry Ford’s revolution.
Obama didn’t stop there. He also believes Al Gore created the internet:
” Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
Having invested taxpayer billions in such disastrous companies as Solyndra, Raser Technologies, Beacon Power, and so on – Obama still thinks government creates new industries. Wrong. And the best example is the PDA in his pocket. The federal government never saw it coming.
Despite facing an established landline industry, the cell phone industry invested billions in cell tower infrastructure because private capital – not government – saw a market. Entrepreneurs like John Stanton and Craig McCaw risked millions and made billions. Today, America depends on a wireless infrastructure that was nonexistent three decades ago – and is entirely private.
Now that’s a revolution. Meanwhile, taxpayer money burns up in boondoggles like ethanol and windmills.
Capitalism based on the law of private property builds modern societies, not government. That Barack Obama doesn’t grasp this – in the most prosperous, capitalist, successful nation in the history of the planet – is disturbing indeed.
Payne: Obama’s unfair UAW Bailout
Posted by hpayne on July 12, 2012
This campaign season, the Midwest has become President Obama’s refuge from the wilting economy as he and his Obamedia entourage make frequent trips to Michigan and Ohio touting the auto bailout as his signature economic achievement.
Twenty-two thousand Delphi autoworkers would disagree.
This week, former Obama Auto Task Force members stonewalled before a House subcommittee rather than detail their administration’s shocking mistreatment of Delphi salaried employees even as it rolled out the red carpet for Delphi’s labor unions. The hearing made clear that this was no auto bailout – this was a UAW bailout. Delphi’s white collars have the scars to prove it.
The Delphi scandal is simple: While union workers of the GM-affiliated parts maker had their pensions fully covered by the bailout, Delphi white collars were thrown to the dogs – that is, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), which gutted up to 70 percent of workers’ pensions. Why? They weren’t major donors to the Democratic Party.
The Delphi employees are the most public victims of a rigged bailout that indisputably helped prevent a collapse of the auto sector during the financial crisis of 2009 – but that also ran roughshod over bankruptcy law, knee-capped bondholders, and eviscerated the life-savings of many teachers, firefighters, and other pensioners. Contrary to Obamedia spin, the Delphi workers’ treatment suggests that a proper managed bankruptcy as proposed by Mitt Romney would have been fairer and more transparent. (Not surprisingly, the Delphi hearings got little mention in the MSM.)
Their “stonewalling over the handling of the Delphi pensions exposes the Big Lie in the administration’s claim of transparency,” reports The Detroit News Daniel Howes. “The beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse in an auto bailout running well north of $80 billion was directly proportional to their ideological kinship and political value. ”
The scandal betrays two truths about the self-described “fair” and “transparent” Obama administration: It is neither fair nor transparent.
Task Force member Ron Bloom, for example, refused to answer questions from the House Committee. Matthew Feldman, chief legal adviser to the auto task force, and task force member Harry Wilson also spoke in tongues.
“What’s shocking,” said U.S. Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, who chaired the hearing, “is these guys show no sense of obligation to the taxpayers. . . or to the people who have been affected.” Kinda spoils that narrative of a compassionate bailout for the workers, eh? Like Auto Czar Steven Rattner who threatened Wall Street bondholders with White House retribution if they didn’t bow to union ownership of Chrysler, the Delphi trio were just musclemen sent by Obama to look out for his union paymasters.
Payne: Why is Obama overhauling the world’s #1 health care system?
Posted by hpayne on July 11, 2012
Wednesday the House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare in its second attempt to preserve the world’s best health care system. The United States is #1 in responsiveness to the needs of patients. It is #1 in cancer survival at 74 percent (Germany, a model for Obamare, is a mere 64 percent). And Americans are #1 in life expectancy. That is, we are #1 in life expectancy among OECD counties once you eliminate fatalities – which is to say, America’s unusually high number of violent crimes.
In other words, health care is not a problem in the United States. Obviously, its biggest problem is crime – particularly crime in urban war zones like Detroit.
So why did President Obama and his fellow Democrats make as their priority a complete overhaul of the best health care system in the world rather than addressing the developed world’s worst violent crime culture, especially in American inner cities like Detroit?
In a word: Power.
Democrats by ideology believe that smart elites – that is, centralized planners not markets – should be entrusted with decision-making. As the Party of Government, the more constituents Democrats can make dependent on government, the better for their political survivability. Inner city black voters already vote overwhelmingly for Democrats (95 percent in the 2008 election year) – but it is the conservative middle class where Republicans trounce Democrats. Make the middle class dependent on a federal heal care entitlement – as Washington has accomplished with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor – and America will shift dramatically to the left as its becomes more dependent on government (and the party of government) than ever.
Tour Detroit and it is immediately clear what America’s biggest problem is. It’s not a lack of health care.
Canadians stream across the border by the tens of thousands to seek medical treatment in Detroit (and other American) hospitals. It is not a two-way street – Detroiters do not seek treatment in the inferior nationalized Canadian health system, an Obamacare model.
Meanwhile, Detroit suffers from chronic crime – routinely killing 50 people per 100,000 citizens year-after-year and placing in the Top 3 three most violent American cities. It is a crisis rooted in a welfare system that has destroyed the lower class family from DC to Appalachia to Detroit (notably, a healthy majority of America’s growing single moms vote Democrat – unlike married moms) – yet is felt most acutely in crowded urban centers where the drug trade and 80 percent fatherless rates mix in an explosive cocktail. Every inner city pathology can be tied to young boys growing up without crucial guidance from male role models.
President Obama is uniquely qualified to address these issue as a black man and a model patriarch of a nuclear family. Yet Obama has never made a pilgrimage to the mean streets of Detroit – even as he has visited GM CEOs and Big Labor honchos. He has made no effort to eliminate the debilitating welfare programs that drive single parenthood – indeed, he has increased welfare spending a n unfortunate25 percent. He has never appeared with Bill Cosby extolling the fundamental need for a father in the home. He has never consoled a family heartbroken by the 350 black-on-black murders that haunt this city every year.
There is no political gain in it. There is political gain in converting the middle class to nationalized health care.
And that is the tragedy of the Obama presidency.
Payne: Obama’s taxpayer-financed toy for the rich
Posted by hpayne on July 10, 2012
So what did your $465 million taxpayer loan to One Percenter Elon Musk get you? Another six-figure toy for President Obama’s rich West Coast friends.
Musk’s Tesla auto company is rolling out its first copies of the Energy Department-financed, $97,700, 300-mile-range Model S electric sedan for journalist review. (Make that $90,200 — you are also paying to give each posh buyer a $7,500 tax credit.)
“This is one amazing car. I mean, hard-core amazing. But first and foremost, gentle reader, it goes like the very stink of hell. Fifty-to-100-mph acceleration in the $97,900 Signature Performance model I drove is positively Lambo-like and. . . .” Okay, okay, easy boy. That’s Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal fawning over Obama’s Car of the Future. Forgive him, that’s the way auto journalists write about the expensive gee-whiz toys they get to test for free.
And who can doubt the thrill of driving a Tesla, or Lamborghini, or Mercedes, or Porsche? But shouldn’t journalists also be asking why on earth taxpayers should be subsidizing purchases of these rare chariots?
It never occurs to Neil. He’s drunk the green Kool-aid. He’s saving the planet. He’s driving the future.
Actually, he’s driving the past. Electrics have been around for over a century. They’ve always been cool, torquey, and easy to drive. They just aren’t as practical as their gas-engined brethren. Remember that $97,700 price tag?
And, Neil’s hyperventilating aside, this is no Lamborghini. Yes, its 0-60 mph time is an impressive 4.4 seconds compared to a $180,000 Lambo Gallardo’s 3.9. And its speed to 130 mph? Well. the Gallardo gets there in 11 seconds, but the Tesla, well. . . 130 mph is as fast as it will go. Meanwhile, the Lambo keeps unwinding to 200 mph (a number six-figure super-car buyers tend to obsess about) and its svelte 3,200-pound svelte chassis will run circles around the 4,600-pound Model S, and . . .
Not a fair comparison, you say? The Model S is a four-door and the Lambo a two-door? Well, okay (even though Neil picked this fight!) — let’s consider the four-door, gas-powered, 400-mile-range Porsche Panamera, available for the same $95 grand. Acceleration times are the same and the 4,200-pound Porsche will take you to 180 mph.
Rare air, I agree — but if taxpayers are going to finance luxury car companies run by eccentric millionaires, shouldn’t they be competitive?
The Tesla S is a technical marvel, no doubt (“the SP package is equipped with a high-capacity drive inverter and twin 10-kilowatt-hour charging inverters for rapid recharge,” thrills Mr. Neil). But all luxury cars are technical marvels. The question is whether it can compete in the market. And the problem with the Model S is the problem with all Democratic green dreams from Solyndra to Fisker to algae- – they are political products (bought by rich folks for political cache) with no more future in the market than the fabulous, 200-mile-range 1910 Detroit electric Victoria.
Payne: Should Ilitch keep it – or Obama spend it?
Posted by hpayne on July 9, 2012
From Gilbert to Ilitch to Penske, Detroit’s entrepreneurs are pouring money into Michigan trying to revitalize its economy and expand their businesses. But if Barack Obama has his way, they’ll be putting more money ” not into jobs, research, and the community – but into Washington’s fiscal black hole.
Flip-flopping his 2009 position during economic hard-times, Obama has decided to raise taxes on America’s most productive class – those earning more than $250k a year – in the midst of 2012’s economic hard times.
The president was for lower tax rates before he was against them. What has changed? In 2009 he was governing; today he is campaigning. In his signature selfish style, Obama would take America over the so-called January 1 “fiscal cliff” to feed his class-war campaign strategy.
How selfish? Obama’s position puts many members of his own party as risk in the November election. Even the liberal Associated Press couldn’t miss the president’s blatant politicking. “Obama has long supported expiration of the tax cuts for those making more than $250,000,” wrote AP today. “But the White House and the president’s re-election team are reviving his arguments now as a way to paint congressional Republicans as obstructionists and Romney as a protector of the wealthy, suggesting the GOP push for an across-the-board extension of the tax cuts puts the middle class at risk.”
Yes, the man is that shallow.
Yet, the estimated tax hike revenue would do little to restrain America’s deepening, trillion-dollar-annual deficit (reducing it by just 5 percent) – a crisis driven, not by lack of tax revenue, but by unbudgeted, unsustainable entitlement expenditures.
As little as lifting the Bush tax cuts would effect DC red ink, it would have profound effects on the national economy (the CBO estimates it would cut already anemic economic growth by 10 percent) – and in Detroit by robbing the region’s chief jobs engines of needed capital.
In 2010 – when the U.S. faced the same expiration of Bush’s tax cuts – The Michigan View consulted financial experts who estimated the increase in the top tax rate plus a capital gains hike would rob Ilitch of $50 million over five years. That is, take millions away from of one of Michigan’s most productive citizens and send it to the Washington sausage mill where politics, favoritism, and bureaucracy would grind it into nothing.
How is this good for the jobless? How is this good for Michigan?