These guys are like the machine in Terminator. They have one single purpose. This is all they do.
Kyle Reese:"Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
Luckily Brian Dickerson takes them to task in this article. The more the media speaks out against this nonsense, the better off we will be.
Until the sequel.
A dozen Republican state legislators want to cut Michigan's income tax, and if I were a more sensible fellow, I wouldn't squander a single drop of printer's ink on their Looney-Tunes scheme.
There's little danger, after all, that the grandstanding group led by state Rep. Shelly Taub, R-Bloomfield Hills, will get anywhere with its goofy plan, which would slash Michigan's personal income tax rate from its current level of 3.9% to 3.5%.
The proposed tax cut is a harmless bit of hokum designed to convince Michiganders who don't know much about our state's upper class-coddling tax system that Taub & Co. are looking out for them. It's the quintessential contribution of lawmakers who bear no responsibility for actual governance, the sort of nonsense you can get away with only if you know that more responsible people in both parties will never let it happen.
But the proposal to cut income taxes (at a time when the GOP-led Legislature has already voted to blow a $2-billion hole in the state budget) is so irresponsible, so unworkable and so cynically disingenuous that we should not let it disappear into the political ether without exposing those responsible for it as the charlatans they are.
Think Brian is a little pissed? Here is why-
In revealing her income tax cut proposal late last week, Taub told Michigan Information and Research Service that it was designed to help the "little people" who are struggling to stay afloat in Michigan.
But an income tax cut would be much more valuable to the upper-tax-bracket denizens of Taub's district, which encompasses the little people of Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Franklin, among others.
Of the 43 states that impose income taxes, 37 maintain a system of graduated marginal tax rates, with higher rates reserved for those with the highest incomes. Michigan is among just a half-dozen states that tax families who earn $50,000 a year and those who earn $500,000 a year at the same rate.
The income tax cut Taub and her colleagues propose would save a family at the low end of that range about $200 a year -- a pittance compared to the $2,000 a family with taxable income of half a million would save.
So while the tax cut Taub proposes would put a few more dollars in the pockets of the "little people" she professes to be worried about, its main impact would be to shift a greater percentage of Michigan's total tax burden from high-income taxpayers to their lower-income neighbors. (Assuming, that is, that Taub and her colleagues had a way to pay for it.)
If that's your idea of tax relief, there's some tropical beachfront in the UP I'd like to sell you.
Dickerson says this will never get through. After last week's amazing display of irresponsibility, I'm not so sure.