Brad Jacobsen has been elected for another two years as our State Representative.
Now that he thinks he has solved the problem of high unemployment and State budget issues he wants to move on to repairing our roads and making our state more attractive to our children so they stay home.
Brad and I have something in common ? we both have children who have left the state to seek their fortunes.
The problem is by fixing the State budget and trying to create jobs by the trickle down method Brad and company are responsible for the already bad road conditions becoming worse.
Additionally, they are responsible for making things worse for our young people to make a decent living wage without being taxed at a rate in the top ten of all States in the country.
That is part of the real reasons why they are leaving Michigan.
Another reason young people might be leaving is because of the lack of investment in education by our State government.
They claim to have added a billion dollars to education during the last four years.
What they really did was play another shell game with our tax dollars by saddling the school districts with a bigger portion of State retirement obligations.
By doing the math you can see that raising $1.4 billion in new taxes on the working and retired taxpayers, giving business $1.7 billion in tax breaks, increasing the State’s rainy day fund by $500 million and giving Detroit over $300 million, there is just nothing left for schools.
In fact in order to make up for the other giveaways they had to cut funding somewhere and that somewhere was to local governments like road commissions, schools and cities and townships.
This took some good jobs in teaching, law enforcement, road maintenance and local government; another blow to young people looking for good jobs.
By saying he wants to improve our cities Brad is trying to justify stripping funds earmarked for Detroit schools and giving it to a billionaire so he can build a new sports and entertainment complex in Detroit to encourage young people to stay here.
Problem is young people who want to raise a family won’t be able to afford to go to the complex their tax dollars helped build.
Now Brad wants to raise the sales tax by one percent to 7% as a way to provide more revenue for roads.
He says that is a more stable way to fund roads than by raising the fuel taxes.
That would tie Michigan with four other States with the second highest sales tax in the country. Sales tax is not a stable revenue source and can raise and lower based on personal income and spending.
It is more likely to be a tax that is borne unequally by the middle class.
It is just another way to tax the middle class rather than fairly tax the end user which includes the business community.
Of course Michigan already has the sixth highest gasoline tax and seventh highest diesel tax in the country.
Perhaps Brad doesn’t want the stigma of having the highest fuel taxes in the country.
Michigan still has the eighth highest unemployment in the country with 7.2 percent.
We are still fifth highest in underemployment with 20.4 percent.
While the entire country has higher employment we still lag behind other states like we did before we made our great investment in tax breaks for business and corporations.
We have worsening roads and a shrinking population to pay for them.
And we still have legislators who want to raise taxes on the shrinking middle class to pay for everything.
Change the political party, change the politician, it doesn’t matter. It looks like the Republican Party has become the party of ‘tax and spend? at least in Michigan.
Gerald Podzikowski
Oxford