Prosperity in Michigan?

By Darren Weeks

I attended a meeting Monday evening about the ongoing budget battle here in Michigan. State senator Randy Richardville, president pro-tempore of the senate, arrived just after I had and sat next to me at my table.

The meeting was held by a group called Americans for Prosperity. I had never heard of this group, but the name sounded a little suspicious to me. I always am concerned about special interest groups that claim to be in favor of "prosperity". Many of them are all about socialist ideologies. Americans for Prosperity is a taxpayer advocacy organization.

Regardless, there was a gentleman, front and center, speaking about the Michigan budget battle that has been making headlines for months. He said that Michigan was in a single-state recession and that we have the highest foreclosure rates in the country, along with the highest exodus of people leaving the state.

It is true that Michigan has been hit very hard by loss of jobs. The automobile manufacturing sector was really the backbone of Michigan's economy. Globalization is directly and completely to blame for utterly destroying the state's economy.

The speaker insisted that the answer to Michigan's problems are to create an environment that is attractive to business — not for the governor to be flying all over the world campaigning for jobs, as Gov. Granholm is now doing in Germany.

Randy whispered to me, "I don't know... it gives her a free vacation." Then, he added as an afterthought, "you paid for that too."

I grinned. Opportunist politicians are far more common that principled and frugal ones. Certainly, Granholm had taken a liking to Germany.

There was a man in the audience that was asking the lawmakers why they weren't getting the job done. They explained that the problem lied in the fact that the legislature was split along party lines with a few republicans that weren't in line with the rest of the party.

As the meeting progressed and the different audience members participated in the discussion, I noticed two things about the people with whom I shared this room.

First, they were very few. There were probably a maximum of between 15 and 20 people present. I had found out about this meeting from my cousin who had sent me an e-mail. But the event had been announced in our local paper as a vital meeting for the future of Michigan's taxpayers. One of the organizers said that she personally had sent out over 150 e-mails. Yet the turnout was pretty pitiful.

Secondly, what I noticed about the "crowd" — if you can refer to 15 or 20 people as a "crowd" — is that they were almost exclusively retirement age. This bothered me even more than the apathy and lack of concern.

On the matter of low attendance, I could attribute parts of that to busy people forgetting about the meeting, or not reading about it in the paper.

But the fact that these folks were almost all over 60 years of age, was a matter that I found greatly disturbing as it served to confirm what I've suspected for a lengthy period of time. Most of the people who read, most of the people who are involved in politics, most of the people who give a rat's toot about what happens in our country are close to dying age.

I was the only individual that was present at this meeting that was under 40. There might have been one woman and a university history instructor who seemed to know the consitution pretty well, that were in their 50's. The rest — organizers and politicians exempt — were elderly.

Sen. Randy, the one who had sat next to me, got up to speak and was pretty testy. He had already become short with a man at the back of the room when the man demanded to know why the budget battle wasn't solved. Randy asked the man, "What have you done about it?" The man replied that he hadn't been able to get elected.

There was another man who vociferously expressed the viewpoint that Michigan's welfare program was "idiotic" and referred to the state politicians as idiots. Randy said, "Are you talking to me?" The man replied that he was. The senator then said he wasn't going to talk to the man any more because the man had called him an "idiot". The man then clarified that it was the policies, not the senator personally, that he was deriding.

They discussed several details, including a proposed $1.50 per line telephone tax that the group was against, but that was currently being proposed.

They derailed the fact that Gov. Granholm cut power to the states office water coolers to save a measly few thousand a year by letting state workers sip warm water, but then raised the allowances for prison workers' uniform dry cleaning to $575.

There was a man in the back of the room who opined that we need a constitutional convention both state and federal. I was kind of going along with him the man, until he dropped that bomb.

I later made it a point to disagree with him and told Randy, as he was gathering his things to leave, that I was quite happy with the constitution that we had, thank you. He replied that there were some issues with the state's constitution that he had, but he had no attention of calling for a federal con con.

I asked him that since the issue of unconstitutional federal mandates had been raised at this meeting, what would be the feasibility of holding the income taxes at the state level and refusing to accept the federal funds. After all, no federal funds equals no federal mandates.

His answer was a brush-off, "I don't know; I'll think about it. I have to get back on the road."

The bottom line is that they expect that there will be an income tax increase in Michigan. Rep. George Cushingberry wants a 4.7 percent increase. They stated that Cushingberry loves to spend other people's money. Sen. Randy Richardville stated that he thought they could "fight them off" and get it lowered to around 4.1 percent.

So much for "prosperity" in the state of Michigan. Thanks, NAFTA and WTO. Trade agreements lead to unemployment, lower quality of products and services and ultimately, higher costs for those low-quality products and services.

Meanwhile, the people are stuck with the tax bill from a governor who, all too willingly sacrifices of her time by traveling the world in search of a job for the remaining occupants of the state who weren't able to sell their house and move.

Isn't "free trade" great? And NAFTA isn't even fully implemented yet.