It’s ironic that Michigan Governor Granholm will soon be convening on Mackinac Island to try and hammer out the details of whatever god-forsaken plan will replace the State’s archaic SBT, which was eliminated last year – because the Mackinac Center for Public Policy has figured out how to eliminate the budget deficit and replace it with nothing.
Mackinac also notes, with regards to new proposals, that:
[T]hese meager efforts are dwarfed by the centerpiece of the plan: $410 million borrowed from future payouts of Michigan’s lawsuit settlement with the tobacco industry. Because the settlement is effectively a court-ordered tax on cigarette makers, borrowing from its future-year payments (with interest) is comparable to taking out a loan against future income tax payments to pay for current spending.
Like all politics, this is the equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the proverbial rug. Your house appears to be in order to the untrained eye – which is most people who are subject to politicians. Any successful politician succeeds by doing precisely this: shift the burden forwards to consumers, backwards to producers, laterally to competitors – but this is the most vile of them all, because like Social Security, it shifts today’s burden onto the generations of tomorrow, which conveniently haven’t been born yet, and so cannot protest or object.
So much for your “social contract.”
