Redstate

By RightMichigan.com Posted in Breaking News | Democrats | Grand Rapids | jennifer granholm | Michigan | recession | tax hike — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Cross-posted on Right Michigan at www.RightMichigan.com.

Remember when you were a kid, looking out the window at night with a blizzard circling the house knowing, just knowing that school was going to be closed the next day and the most important task you were going to encounter the next morning wasn't any pop quiz... it was the choice between Captain Crunch and Corn Pops?  If you've got kids or younger siblings you're probably staring at the snow and daydreaming about good times right now.  

A whole school day of nothing but cartoons and sledding.  

Any chance we can get back to those days?  No?  I hate growing up.  But alas, that's a part of life I suppose and real life intrudes on us again this morning.  I'm going to ask everyone to try to remember something else now this time your brains only have to go back to Tuesday.  Remember when the Governor talked about the whopping three cost saving measures she planned to use to help pay for twenty-four new government expansions?  

It's OK if you don't.  It was an awfully quick section in her big-government speech.  But if you do remember that part of the performance and you're anything like me there's one particular "reform" that continues to stick out like a sore thumb.  The Governor said:

"There are three major reforms I want to underscore: first, we can achieve significant savings in our Corrections Department by adopting changes that save money but do not compromise public safety."

Yep.  We can save money by adopting changes that save money.  Brilliant.  I literally scratched my head when she said that and asked some of the folks I was watching the speech with, `what?'

The good folks on the editorial board at the Detroit News might have been asking the same question because when the Governor sat down to hard-sell them on her fancy new initiatives yesterday they tried to get an answer.  And the message the Gov delivered was precisely the message we were all afraid of.

The governor called for diversion of some inmates into mental health treatment and into tether programs for nonviolent offenders.

"Part of the savings should be placed into increasing law enforcement and education," said Granholm, who proposed Tuesday putting 100 more state police troopers on the streets. The recruit school would cost $7.3 million.

We're going to save money by saving money by letting criminals out of jail early.  Awesome!  It seems perfectly fitting that she'd then propose putting a hundred new cops on the street.  We're going to need them to help pick up all the repeat and progressively more violent offenders.  Just stop and think, for a moment, about the logic here.

Granholm tells us that we don't have enough police on the street to fight crime.  She tells us she wants to fund 100 more directly through the State and talks about helping local governments hire more police.  Because there's already too much crime.  Because there's already a safety problem.  And then she says `hey, lets let thousands of criminals out of jail early!'

Is there any place on the planet where this makes sense and would the Governor consider moving there?  Her law-and-order platform isn't just illogical, it's stupid and Michigan families may very well literally pay with their lives.

Wait, wait one second.  Now that I think about it, I might actually know someplace the Governor would feel right at home.  Maybe she could join the Grand Rapids Public Schools School Board.  If you think her stand on corrections was asinine wait until you hear the new idea the Board is pushing.  The Grand Rapids Press reports:

The district has 4,648 high school students in buildings designed to hold 6,140 and expects to lose about 1,000 high schoolers in the next 10 years.

And those buildings did hold close to capacity only a decade ago.  But not anymore.  That's not good, right?  Declining enrollment, kids leaving, parents yanking them and moving them.  Bad things.  But with fewer students come fewer costs and... wait, wait, wait.  That makes sense in Ms. Carrol's 9th grade Algebra class but that doesn't make sense in the world of big government bureaucrats.

With the district expecting to be at half capacity in the next ten years the Board has an idea.  Raise taxes on local homeowners and spend $200 million on new construction!  Build new pools.  New auditoriums.  Two new sports STADIUMS.  And they're not just talking about raising taxes by $200 million.  They're serious:

Committee members want the school board to put the question on the ballot within 18 months, but urge members to look for public-private partnerships, state help and creative financing to ease the burden on residents.

I hope they're ready to look for about $200 million worth of creative financing and private donor dollars.  When your schools are at half capacity and dropping like a lead balloon you don't need to build bigger and better.  Does that only make sense to me?  This is a SCHOOL board making these recommendations.  Implicit in the concept of a school board is the idea that the members have actually graduated from a school themselves.  They've got SOME brains at least.  I mean, they're supposed to, aren't they?

Heck, even if we were holding enrollment steady this wouldn't be the time to swipe another couple hundred million from the local economy.  Some folks might not have noticed but there's a recession raging these days.  And that hit home for over one hundred Chrysler employees yesterday who unexpectedly found pink slips waiting for them when they arrived at work, an offense the local union isn't going to take lying down.  In fact, it's "WAR!"  The Ivory Tower reports:

More than 100 UAW members rallied at the local's Warren headquarters over the lunch hour Thursday, just hours after being told by the company that those salaried designers would be laid off indefinitely.

"It looks like we are at war with the company. They're doing everything wrong here," Jeff Hagler, Local 412 president, told the Free Press. "The company seems to be doing whatever they want to do and it is a slap in the face of the union. And we're going to be doing what we've got to do to take them on over it."

Chrysler officials have said the layoffs are volume-related and part of the November announcement to eliminate as many as 12,000 jobs on top of a February 2007 plan to cut 13,000 positions over three years.

Talk about a rough Thursday... errr... just another Thursday in Michigan.  But don't worry, we're going to cut costs by finding savings and fix declining enrollment by taxing through the nose and building fancier buildings.  

And then we wonder why we're in this shape.