Flint Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz is leading a push to increase city income taxes by 0.5% for residents and 0.25% for non-residents. That’s a 50% increase. Why? Turns out Flint is out of money and needs revenue. It’s almost as if Flint’s problems weren’t caused by waste, fraud, and mismanagement after all.
More after the jump.
As I reported yesterday, the Michigan House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure voted to eliminate the sales tax on aviation fuel. This bill is in addition to House Bill 4539 which if passed, will eliminate the sales tax on gasoline sales in our state. My piece said that this would take $770.1 million out of the School Aid Fund (SAF). However, that amount is only for the repeal of the gasoline tax. According to a statement by State Rep. Brandon Dillon, yesterday’s repeal of the aviation fuel tax will remove another $55 million . That means if both bills are passed, $825.1 million more will be taken from our kids’ schools. This represents over two-thirds of the $1.2 billion Governor Snyder has asked for for road repair.
Click through for more including details on how you can make your voice heard on this issue.
Michigan Republicans are getting ready to inflict further catastrophic damage on our state’s schools with the passage of a package of bills designed to pay for road and bridge repair, a major priority of Governor Rick Snyder. The bills say nothing about education or the School Aid Fund but the impact is there to the tune of more than $770.1 million.
Click through for all the gory details and information on how you can take action TODAY!
If there is one thing that you could count on hearing in the stump speeches of Michigan Republicans during the 2010 midterm campaign it was that they were going to lower your taxes, by God. Smaller government funded by fewer taxes was their recipe for success.
Of course, they immediately got to work NOT lowering taxes and passed the Emergency Manager Law, started a campaign to destroy all unions that is well into its third year and have continued to attack women’s reproductive rights and freedoms with an anti-woman zeal not seen since the days of New England witch trials.
But today, April 15th — Tax Day — it’s worth taking a moment to pause and realize that not only did they not lower our taxes, for more than half of the people living, working and trying to get by in Michigan, they actually RAISED taxes.
Click through for much more.
Michigan State Budget Director John Nixon appeared on Off the Record with Tim Skubick this week. Unfortunately for him, the wheels sort of fell of the car when the conversation turned to the impact of the Republicans nearly $2 billion in business tax cuts on job creation. Nixon first said, unequivocally, that the tax cuts have created jobs. Then he said he can’t prove it. And then he finished by saying, well, they really haven’t kicked in yet so it’s hard to say.
It gets hard to keep up with these guys sometimes.
As I have been telling folks for the past year, Republicans have raised the effective tax rates on more than half of all Michiganders in the past year. You’ll notice when you do your state taxes this year; many folks are already facing the reality that, instead of getting a refund like they always have in the past, they now OWE several hundred dollars to the State of Michigan. Get your checkbooks out, folks. SOMEBODY has to pay for nearly $2 billion in tax cuts for corporations and that somebody is YOU.
Meanwhile, as the tax coffers start to overflow a bit, Republicans are eager to sock some of it away into the Budget Stabilization Fund, otherwise known as the “Rainy Day Fund”. During the financial meltdown during the latter half of the Bush administration, Governor Granholm was forced to use that money to keep the state afloat. The fund now has a half billion dollars in it. The question many are asking is if we should put MORE money in it.
What do YOU think? Take our poll after the jump.
Tune in to Fox News for a few minutes and they’re bound to tell you what America’s problem is — as if they’re not it.
The truth is we don’t have a spending problem, we have a people repeating what they hear on Fox News problem. This effective, purposeful creation of an alternate Republican universe where cutting spending helps the economy — unless it’s military spending! — and the deficit is the reason people are out of work is hurting the economy and keeping people out of work.…
My kids are in town today and we decided to drive to The Henry Ford to see The Hobbit in 3D and Imax (squee!) It had been snowing and blowing for a couple hours and there were three inches or so of snow on the ground. The road in front of our house was pretty slick but I knew that, once I got on I-94, the main highway into Detroit, I’d be fine. It’s a main artery, after all, with heavy truck and commuter traffic.
We got 5 miles down the highway and decided that it was simply too dangerous to continue. We saw three accidents with cars and trucks in the ditch, one all the way into the woods on the side of the road.
For three inches of snow.
My rant after the jump.
Back in February, I wrote piece titled “The tax timebomb that explodes in Michigan in 2012 is MUCH worse than you thought”. The piece got a lot of attention, primarily because it was a big news flash that in order to pay for the billions in giveaways to Michigan corporations, Michigan Republicans raised taxes on over half of the people in Michigan. And, make no mistake, true to Republican) form, the impact was far greater on lower income Michiganders than on our wealthiest citizens.
Postcards notifying many of these people about the tax hit they are about take arrived in mailboxes in Michigan this week.
Take a look after the jump.
House Republicans have released a counter-proposal to President Obama’s budget plan to avoid plunging us off the fiscal cliff speed bump. Unsurprisingly, it raises tax revenue but doesn’t allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. In fact, according to analysis by the Washington Post, it appears to lower taxes for the top tax bracket.
Details and more GOPocrisy and insanity after the jump.
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