Redstate

Posted at 8:38am on Jun. 11, 2008 Right Michigan: The (Liberal Economic Policies Kill) Business Edition

By RightMichigan.com

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

If one day didn't permanently kill all of those jobs maybe two or three days will.  The Teamsters walkout at a Michigan auto delivery company continues today with no immediate end in sight.  But on the upside, those wounds are directly self inflicted.  The union members understand they're probably blowing their own jobs away.  According to the Detroit News:

Posted in Breaking News | Michigan | recession | tax hike | Teamsters | www.RightMichigan.com — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 8:12am on Apr. 28, 2008 It's like rain on your wedding day

By RightMichigan.com

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

You've got to love irony.  Assuming you know what it is... I know we've got a few friends who like to visit the site these days who get big words like that confused with others... mean turns to median, irony turns to iconic which turns to iconoclastic.  Whoa!  But chin up, at least you're in good company.

Irony, for the definitionally challenged, is "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected."

Exhibit A:  House Democrats suddenly admitting their massive MBT surcharge should be repealed.

The Detroit News reports this morning on the growing number of Michigan businesses being crushed under massive increases in their tax burden.  The Michigan Chamber of Commerce reports that many small and medium sized businesses are seeing doubling, tripling and even a quadrupling of their previous tax liability.  The Republican controlled Senate last week passed a $240 million tax relief package to ease the burden but the Democrat controlled House of Representatives is yet to take any action.  According to the News:

Read on . . .

Posted in Breaking News | Democrats | hate monger | jennifer granholm | Jeremiah Wright | Michigan | tax hike — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 6:12am on Mar. 11, 2008 MI Morning Update: Suprise, Suprise, MI Dems have a plan to increase taxes by $42 million

By saul anuzis

239 Days until Election Day

MORNING UPDATE:

Michigan House Democrats push a $42 million tax increase…didn’t we say we told you so? When Democrats control Michigan, your taxes go up. It happens every time.

The Political, Candidate & Party Assistance team were on the road again last night on the "Unity Road Show" in Oakland county Michigan. I met with Oakland County GOP Chair Dennis Cowan before the meeting to discuss plans and strategy.

Posted in Democrats | jennifer granholm | Michigan Republicans | Republicans | tax hike — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:44am on Feb. 27, 2008 Granholm and House Dems pushing hard for new $8 billion hidden tax hike

By RightMichigan.com

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

If Michigan is in a backwater and you've been captaining the ship for the last six years what does that say about your ability at the helm?  I'm just asking.  

Jennifer Granholm returned from Washington D.C. and decided it was time to get serious, for the first time since she was elected in 2002, about encouraging alternative energy production in Michigan.  Apparently she's abandoned the carrot and stick method and gone exclusively to the stick.  Criticize the State you're leading and then slap residents struggling to make ends meet under the yolk of your last $2.4 billion tax hike with a brand new record shattering $8 billion tax increase.  That ought to clear up whatever ails us.  

Posted in alternative energy | Andy Dillon | Breaking News | jennifer granholm | Michigan | monopoly | Right Michigan | tax hike — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:20am on Feb. 22, 2008 Democrats raising taxes again?! Yep.

By RightMichigan.com

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

And you thought the Democrats in Lansing were done raising your taxes.  Silly you.  They're may have promised that they were done for this term in office but just like the Governor's promise in 2006 not to raise the sales tax on services, the promise now looks like it was more hot air than anything else.

Let's jump in the way-back machine and revisit December 2007.  Two-plus months after Jennifer Granholm and her cronies in the House and Senate Democrat caucuses (plus Valde Garcia and Ron Jelinek) decided it'd be a smart idea to take $2.4 billion out of a struggling job market suffering under the weight of a single-state recession all of the language and verbiage and promises out of Lansing were that the tax hikes were over.

Posted in Barack Hussein Obama | Breaking News | John McCain | Michigan | tax hike | taxes — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:09am on Feb. 11, 2008 Economists: Granholm's economy worst since Great Depression!

By RightMichigan.com

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

Yikes.  This can't be what the Granholm administration was hoping to hear from an Ann Arbor think tank.  A recent study undertaken by a group of big brains down around the University of Michigan examined the State's biggest metropolitan areas along with the other big cities across the country to figure out where exactly the rest of the big brains are choosing to locate.

Posted in Archived | Congress | Economic Stimulus | Economy | jennifer granholm | Michigan | rebate | tax cut | tax hike — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:34am on Feb. 4, 2008 Another day, another load of mixed signals to job makers

By RightMichigan.com

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

Discussion ramps up this week in Washington, D.C. and Lansing, Michigan over various budget and stimulus plans aimed at getting various economies out of various stages of recession.  The national economy hasn't entered a recession just yet but fears are running high and the Republicans and Democrats are all trying to hurdle one another on the road to one plan or another.  Here in Michigan we've been in a single-state recession for the last six years or so and the Governor is racing back to that same old bag of tricks that have failed to correct the ship her first five years in office.

Posted in Breaking News | Carl Levin | jennifer granholm | Michigan | senate | Stimulus | tax break | tax hike | tax refund — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 8:39am on Feb. 1, 2008 Michigan lefties have officially stopped making sense

By RightMichigan.com

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.  

Posted in Breaking News | Democrats | Grand Rapids | jennifer granholm | Michigan | recession | tax hike — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:12am on Jan. 30, 2008 One Time Fixes: Oh, so THAT'S how we're going to pay for it...

By RightMichigan.com

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

24 expansions of government and only 4 limitations.  If you want to call them that.  When you boil it all down last night the Mackinac Center reports that we heard Jennifer Granholm propose twenty-four expansions of government and only four limitations.  Ant those... They were things like "achieve significant savings in our Corrections Department by adopting changes that save money."  She claims that at the end of the day these four limitations will represent $200 million in savings.  Which covers two-thirds the cost of one of the twenty-four expansions of government, the new Bob Thompson-esque charter schools.

Posted in Breaking News | Budget | Democrats | jennifer granholm | Michigan | tax hike — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:35am on Jan. 7, 2008 MI Governor hits a new low: Granholm playing political games with Human Services

By RightMichigan.com

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

Some interesting details began to emerge over the weekend regarding the sudden three-hundred-plus million dollar budget surplus the State miraculously discovered after closing the books on 2007.  When all was said and done there was about $350 million sitting in the bank that the good folks in Lansing hadn't expected to be there and before they got a chance to figure out the where and the how and the what-now a creeping, insidious spin started to permeate the press almost instantly.

While people like House Minority Leader Craig DeRoche suggested immediately that something was amiss the administration began talking to the press and "reminding" them that with projected deficits facing the State in 2008 this money was almost like a Christmas miracle.  They shouldn't question it, they should just note that this will help balance the books in the coming year.  It's a subtle move.  Just don't address the "where" and the "how" and talk about the money in "conservative" terms.  Talk about how it will help avoid future tax increases.  Because no one likes tax hikes in an election year.

All of a sudden no one remembers to ask where it came from or what the appropriate response really is (did I hear someone say "refund").  Heck, some folks in the press even lose their minds and start printing flat out lies.  Take the big headline story from the Associated Press over the weekend:

Faced with a $1.75 billion shortfall, lawmakers and Granholm increased revenue by $1.3 billion by raising the state income tax on Oct. 1 and placing a surcharge on the new Michigan Business Tax that took effect Jan. 1. They also trimmed or restricted spending by more than $400 million.

Some House Republicans say the surplus shows the government wasn't as desperate for new revenue as it claimed during last year's budget negotiations.

"Normally finishing financially in the black is a job well done, but I can't look at it that way when the wallets of hardworking families of Michigan were just squeezed because the state said it needed more money or else," GOP Rep. Kevin Elsenheimer of Kewadin said in a release last week.

Representative Elsenheimer brings up a good point.  And the article is presenting the "conservative" angle, so what's the problem?  Where's the inaccuracy or the bias?  Go back to that first paragraph.  Not only was it a $1.4 billion tax hike complete with a $900 million compliance cost (making it a $2.3 billion tax hike on businesses) that's not the sentence that'll drive you crazy.  "They also trimmed or restricted spending by more than $400 million."

Patently false.  Unequivocally untrue.  The FY2007-2008 budget was the biggest budget in the history of the State of Michigan.  Spending increased over FY2006-2007.  There was no trimming.  There was only restricting if you go with the strictest definition of the word and assume that the fact they didn't spend a hundred billion dollars buying every Michigan child a pony represents some sort of fiscal restraint.  

But the article has done it's job.  It's muddied the waters.  It's protecting the entrenched Democrat big government interests in Lansing (as the MSM is want to do) and put on a nice coat of camouflage by talking to Republicans to make the piece look bipartisan.  And still the question remains... where exactly did this extra cash come from?

For the answers we'll go to this morning's lead editorial in the Detroit News:

Half the surplus in the General Fund is the result of unexpectedly strong revenues in the last couple of months of the budget year. The other half is the result of what are known as "lapses," or unspent appropriations that are returned to the treasury. Three-quarters of this amount came from the Departments of Health and Human Services as the result of reductions in their spending in the last quarter of the budget year, according to an analysis by the state Senate Fiscal Agency published late last month.

It should be remembered that these departments, along with the State Police, were embarrassed when it was revealed that they had overspent their appropriations for the 2006 fiscal year by about $50 million and state lawmakers were not informed until after the gubernatorial election.

Posted in Breaking News | Budget | Ethics | Granholm | Michigan | tax hike | taxes | www.RightMichigan.com — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Read More »