Regardless of your politics, you have to feel a little sorry for Governor Rick Snyder. He tore a tendon jogging in Florida on vacation, and is on crutches and in a cast.
However, he vows not to give in to the pain, which I’d guess is worse than he admits, and says he’ll give the State of the State speech as expected a week from today.
I hope he has the good sense to give this speech sitting down. But as much as I admire the governor’s stoicism about this, he said something yesterday that was both annoying and untrue.
As he signed legislation to put a road funding package on the ballot in May, the governor said
“Our lawmakers deserve credit for confronting this challenge.”
Well, they don’t.
They did anything but “confront the challenge” of Michigan’s collapsing roads. They refused to do their jobs and appropriate the revenue to fix them. That’s how representative democracy is supposed to work. Except ours doesn’t.
There is no doubt that our roads are falling apart. More than a billion dollars a year will be needed for many years to get them back to reasonable shape.
Last winter, all you heard people say was “just fix the damn roads.”
But our lawmakers wouldn’t. Mostly, this was because they were afraid of being attacked for raising taxes, no matter how necessary a revenue increase this was.
Finally, they decided to stick the people with the responsibility, by throwing a sales tax increase on the ballot.
There are lots of reasons that’s a bad way to do this, including that it disproportionately falls on the poor and those who don’t drive. But that’s what they did.
The lawmakers know getting the voters to approve a new tax will be anything but easy.
So they turned this into a Christmas tree, festooning it with all sorts of sweeteners, some totally unrelated to the roads. The lawmakers also passed and the governor signed a whole flock of bills that only take effect if the sales tax passes.
For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor would be fully restored. Forty million dollars would be provided for at-risk children in need.
There’d be new rules on competitive bidding and new money for railroad crossings. Et cetera, et cetera.
Just about the only thing left out was money to buy me a pony. The idea was to make everyone some offer they couldn’t refuse, so they’d have to show up and vote for it.
Well, I’m not sure it will work. In an era of junk science, this is junk government. Even if this passes, it will take some time for serious money to get to the roads, because of all the other things that have to be paid for.
If the people we pay to make laws aren’t willing to make tough decisions, we should ask what we are paying THEM for.
I may, in the final analysis, vote yes to save my axles, but I am not convinced a majority will. I do know, however, that the only thing our lawmakers deserve credit for is passing the buck.
They failed us, and we ought to think about why.
Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. You can read his essays online at michiganradio.org. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.
