Daley gives Mich. fair warning on tax hikes
I don't know whether Gov. Jennifer Granholm has plans to call for tax increases when she unveils her budget next week. The governor is on record favoring a graduated income tax. Before she puts that on the table, she should consider the words of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who went on a jobs fishing trip to Oregon after that state raised income taxes on top earners and businesses.
"What happened in Oregon is not good news for Oregon," the Wall Street Journal quoted Daley, who is touting Illinois' 3 percent top income tax rate. "They believe that anybody who makes $125,000 or more or businesses or anyone who makes $250,000 -- they're gonna start taxing them. They call them 'rich people.' I've always thought America stands for (rewarding success). I never knew it's a class war -- that those who succeed in life are the ones that have to bear all the burden. It will be a whole change in America that those who succeed, work hard, we're gonna tax 'em more than anyone else."
That's fair warning and sound advice for Granholm, and for that matter, President Obama.
Obama shows his cards on nuclear plants
Did President Barack Obama really mean it when he said in his State of the Union address that the nation needs a "new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" to help meet its energy needs?
The answer may be found in his budget, released nearly a week later.
The spending plan wipes out funding for development of the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada, the only site in the pipeline for disposing of radioactive waste.
Without a disposal site, development of the nuclear power plants Obama mentioned will be much more difficult. The waste has to go somewhere or the plants can't operate.
In this, the president is deferring to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who opposes the Yucca Mountain site.Obama is right -- the nation needs to embrace nuclear power. But not as much, apparently, as the president needs to keep Reid happy.
Once again, politics prevails.
Who's Obama lecturing on fiscal discipline?
President Barack Obama is becoming a master of deflection.
Listen to the president's remarks after dropping a budget document that includes the largest deficit since World War II: "What I will not welcome -- what I reject -- is the same old grandstanding when the cameras are on, and the same irresponsible budget policies when the cameras are off. It's time to save what we can, spend what we must, and live within our means once again."
Live within our means? Who's he kidding, and who's he lecturing?
This is his budget, and his deficit, which, by the way, is equal to one-third of total spending.
That's not even close to living within our means.
And Obama's future spending plan continues massive deficit spending for at least another decade.
But give Obama credit for having the audacity to try to spin his out-of-control spending proposal into a move toward fiscal responsibility.
Will Granholm offer more reforms?
As encouraging as it is to see Gov. Jennifer Granholm finally get down to attacking the real cost of government -- overly rich publicly employee benefits -- her plan to trim $450 million from the state budget gets Michigan less than one-third of the way to erasing a $1.6 billion budget deficit.
Where will the rest of the money come from?
We should get a clue tomorrow night, when the governor gives her final State of the State address. The thing to watch for is whether Granholm adds more money-saving ideas to her initial plan.
If she doesn't, it means she'll be counting on either another bailout from Washington or a huge tax hike. Or both.
President Barack Obama included in his budget a request for $25 billion to help out states with Medicaid costs. That would give Michigan another one-year reprieve.
Granhom is also being pushed to broaden the sales tax and/or adopting a graduated income tax, either of which would hurt the state's economy.
More cuts and reforms will be painful, but are the only acceptable option.
Bashing the man is bad business
President Barack Obama has ramped up his rhetoric demonizing Wall Street, big corporations and the wealthy. He answered Republican calls for across-the-board tax cuts to stimulate the economy by saying, "Billionaires don't need tax cuts."
That's great stuff on the campaign trail. But Obama has to govern now. It's his responsibility to get the country back on track.
When he hits investors with the threat of punitive measures, they stop investing. Less investment means fewer jobs. And that's a direct blow to the middle class.
For example, when Obama chided corporations for holding gatherings in Las Vegas, business in that city nearly dried up, hurting a lot of average workers in the tourist economy.
The reality is that there's no way to beat up Big Business and rich folks without also hurting the average guy.
Make early childhood education a priority
As Michigan's policymakers debate new spending priorities, deciding which services a shrinking state can support and which it can't, it ought to move early childhood education higher up the list.
When education funding was cut last fall, nearly all of the protests were targeted at K-12 budgets and the Promise Scholarships for college students. Little was said about the cuts that have been steadily eroding funding for early childhood programs.
But a new study by the Early Childhood Investment Corp. says Michigan could ultimately save $1 billion a year if it placed a greater emphasis on preparing preschoolers to learn. Children who enter kindergarten ready to learn, the study says, need fewer special services and are less likely to fail.
Lots of hard choices will be made this year to balance the budget. There will be some winners and lots of losers.
Early childhood education should be on the winning side.
At least they like us in France
The disconnect between what's important to the Obama administration and what's important to the American public was evident during Valerie Jarrett's Sunday morning appearance on "Meet the Press."
Host David Gregory asked the White House senior adviser what difference President Barack Obama had made during his first year in office.
Her reply: The rest of the world likes us better. Jarrett cited improved feelings about the United States in Europe and the Middle East as the president's stand-out freshman accomplishment.
Maybe Americans who continue to lose their jobs and homes because Obama gave economic issues short shrift while he was shuffling U.S. policies to make them more palatable to the United Nations are comforted knowing our country is more popular.
But I suspect a secure paycheck is much higher on their priority list, as it should have been on Obama's. Jarrett's answer was damning evidence of an administration lost in its own agenda.
Brown gets the Sarah Palin treatment
It didn't take long for the entertainment and media arm of the Democratic Party to turn its guns on Scott Brown, the newly elected Republican U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
The night after the victory, a shrill David Letterman fired off a series of weak jokes about Brown's appearance as a Cosmopolitan centerfold when he was in college. The over-the-hill late night comic was so bitter he could barely laugh at his own punchlines.
The next day, the Huffington Post breathlessly revealed a 25-year-old music video in which Brown's wife, television reporter Gail Huff, appears in a black bikini. It's fairly tepid stuff by today's standards. Huffington threw in a vacation photo of Brown and his two bikini-clad daughters for good measure.
This is the Sarah Palin treatment -- an attempt to marginalize a GOP rising star by dismissing him as frivolous and perhaps even morally challenged. It won't work. The people see too much of themselves in Brown and his family to be swayed by cultural elites with whom they have nothing in common.
Peters fears those moderate 'extremists'
At least one Michigan congressman didn't get the message voters sent Tuesday in Massachusetts. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, dashed off a fundraising e-mail Thursday, urging supporters to help him fight off the "extremists" who orchestrated Scott Brown's Senate victory.
Peters is referring, I guess, to the independent voters who surged into the Republican camp in anger and frustration about what Peters and his fellow Democrats are doing in Washington.
Those are the voters typically considered middle-of-the-road, the same ones, by the way, who carried both President Barack Obama and Peters to victory in 2008.
Peters has lined up behind the far-left leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Massachusetts votes declared Pelosi and her followers -- like Peters -- to be the extremists, out of touch with mainstream concerns.
If Peters hopes to hang on to his seat, now considered quite competitive, he'll need to do a better job of reading the tea leaves.
Freedom is on the decline in America
The land of the free isn't so free anymore.
The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom drops the United States from its list of "free" countries as measured by unobstructed markets. The U.S. is now considered "mostly free" by the index, prepared by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal. The list is topped by Hong Kong and names Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland and Canada as free nations.
That's a significant slap for the country that perfected free market capitalism but is now turning its back on the values that led to its prosperity.
Nations that are the most free are historically the most prosperous. Ceding more and more control of the economy to the political class will inevitably mean a lesser quality of life. Americans allow the government's encroachment on the marketplace to continue at the risk of the well-being of their children and grandchildren.
The United States risks joining the European nations as a country in decline because it put its faith in the government instead of the people.
