Where were these guys just three years ago?

by: Eric B.

Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 11:30:44 AM EST

The Holland Sentinel joins a small, weak, annoying chorus of papers around the state bent out of shape that the governor last week said we need to make reforms. What's the beef? Well, there is this headline:

Granholm reform ideas far too late

Interesting ... if you carry this through to its logical conclusion, it must mean that we're all screwed. After all, you don't declare "Too little, too late" unless you've gone past some point of no return. Meanwhile:

But Granholm (and, to be fair, most every other state elected official) failed to confront the deficit, advancing only piecemeal solutions while Michigan lurched from crisis to embarrassing crisis. The ship of state was sinking, and it seemed Granholm was merely rearranging the deck chairs.

Does anyone remember that service tax disaster from 2007? I mean, we're headed generally towards a broad service tax this year, potentially coupled with a reduction in the sales tax. Right, the genesis of that service tax just three years ago was the governor's recommendation in her budget from that year that the state ... address the structural problems in the budget by adopting a broad service tax to reflect how the economy has changed. As part of that budget proposal, she suggested a series of carrots and sticks ... to get local governments cooperating and sharing services, and also to get school districts to do the same (even at the RESD level).

In short, many of the ideas percolating around Lansing today, and that have gained traction today, are ideas first publicly proposed by the governor three years ago.  Granted, they were not necessarily her ideas, but she proposed them. 

What did she get for her pains? Laughed at. Most of the state's media took more seriously Republican talking points that the fat had not yet been cut entirely from the state budget bone, and insisted that her calls to balance out where the state got its revenue were not necessary, would destroy the state's economy, and that we should be more serious about cutting the state budget.  It took an entire spring-and-summer's worth of stories from around the state about how dire things really were before we stopped seeing that "there remains fat on the bone" idiocy. This, of course, led us right into the budget shutdown and eventual service/MBT surcharge disaster.  By then, all of the reforms -- in both spending and revenue -- that the governor had proposed were all dead and buried.

What we're seeing today is the political and media establishment finally take seriously some of what the governor proposed in 2007 ... and they're mad at her because they are three years late in doing so.