SEARCH BLOG: STATE OF MICHIGAN
Last night, Governor Granholm gave a stirring speech in which she emphasized for nearly an hour how she was not going to let the state fall apart, but was going to "invest" in its future with many new or expanded programs meant to stimulate better education and repair the cities.
Some of the sound bites seemed appealing, if you accepted the rhetoric. Others made you wonder what she was focused on the first four years of her administration. The "new" programs sounded vaguely like her original campaign stumping. Some sounded a little pollyannic such as her plan to widely expand the scope of alternative fuels programs and availability by 2008... which is now less than a year away. Some were good business such as combining city/county purchasing to get volume discounts.
She appealed to our sense of family by saying that she wanted to expand child protection services and add many more workers in that area. She appealed to our idea of rising from the ashes by offering free education for the next 3 years to displaced workers.
We might be in a recession in Michigan and businesses may be folding and homes may be unsalable... but Michigan government was going to fix things.
I waited for the "hammer" and it fell oh so softly near the end when she spoke of the need to make up the lost revenue and how the "naysayers" had to step up [with the money]. She never said "raise taxes," but it was obvious that 2 plus 2 was equalling 7 until that point.
So it boiled down to this: the State is in trouble because, despite her best efforts for 4 years, the economy is a mess and the people need to be bailed out. In order to achieve this bailout, the Governor is simply asking for more of our money which will be redistributed to make this state "miraculously pleasant and healthy" once again.
"Trust me."
