Damnit. I knew the second I went into radio silence something would move me to say something- and this is it.
Hello. My name is Cathleen, and I am a blogging addict. Acceptance is the first step to recovery. But I have to take this hit off the crack pipe. Just one more, really, then I'm done.
Once again I find that Peter Luke is the only reporter that is worth a damn in this state- the rest are running around screaming "tax increase! tax increase!" and getting people all pissed off. Both the Detroit News and the LSJ ran a poll asking if people would support a tax increase, and both were running 90% against, of course. The Fress Press article by Dawson "When can we blame the Governor?" Bell specifically mentions a tax increase in the first few paragraphs and hammers on that throughout.
The media once again chooses to ignore the complex difficulty that we are facing and immediately goes for the sensational. Nowhere, nowhere, can I find the full exchange of the media "pressing" her on this question. The one pertinent quote I have found is this-
At the same time, she avoided answering questions about whether she is prepared to call for a tax increase to address the state's budget deficit, which she said could be in the range of $3 billion.
"I'm not giving you a headline to write," she said. "I'm preparing people for the fact that this is going to be significantly challenging."
"Despite repeated prodding from reporters", she never said either way. Didn't matter, the media is writing that headline anyway, either explicitly or implicitly, except for Mr. Luke. He does mention it, but he gets into the heart of the matter and doesn't dwell. Go read his whole story if you want a picture of what is going on here, and pay close attention to the closing paragraph-
Doug Drake, a budget and tax analyst at the Lansing consulting firm Public Policy Associates, said selling a general tax increase to the public would be difficult because the budget has been balanced for the past half-decade through fee hikes and painless accounting gimmicks. But those are being exhausted as the state's economic troubles mount.
"We've spent years now without raising taxes and in a lot of ways, people really don't understand there's a problem," Drake said.
No, we have spent years being told by the Republicans that we can have something for nothing, that we shouldn't have to pay for the society that we live in, that greed is good, that taking responsibility for our world is always someone else's problem. Thank you Ronald Reagan.
We need a serious attitude adjustment here in Babylon.
Or, we can follow the "Walmarting of America" path and let it all come crashing down, and then maybe we will learn our lesson. In the meantime, I don't want to hear any more bitching about education cuts, the prisons, the foster care system, revenue sharing to cities, your street being plowed, none of it. Get out your wallet, or shut the fuck up. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Detroit News.
Who killed Ricky Holland? We did. Deal with it.
UPDATE 8:25 PM- Just caught this-
Republicans are still singing the "single state recession" song in regards to this story.
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said in a news release that tax increases are not part of his agenda for Michigan.
"The Senate Republicans will not look to tax increases as our first answer to any budget problem. We need to live within our means, and if we can't, it is not up to the hard working citizens of Michigan to bail us out," he said. "The last thing we need to do in this single-state recession is to make Michigan less competitive with other states."
And from WOOD tonight, on the so-called migration rate out of Michigan-
The state's demographer said the migration could be worse if other states weren't in similar shape. But now, 38 states have unemployment rates within 3 percent of Michigan's.
In the 1980s, when migration was the worst, only six states were like Michigan.
The Pubs need some new tunes. Or not. Maybe they should just face the music for a change.
OK, rant over. Back to vacation.
This is why you never, ever write a "Goodbye Cruel World" diary on the blogs, because chances are the moment you do you will have something else to say.
;-)