The View From Afar Of This Week In News

One of the loveliest things about vacationing is that it gets me away from all sort of electronic media. This time around I didn't go on a complete news ban, but instead followed the news by reading a variety of newspapers as I sat under palm trees on a tranquil Caribbean beach. The nice thing about following the news at that distance is that it's a lot easier to see the big patterns without getting sucked into the daily froth.

So, before I lose the tranquility, I thought I'd share my thoughts on a few of last week's big stories, working from the international stage to Michigan.

Middle East Protests -- Democratic protests and possible reforms continue to sweep through the Middle East. It looks as if the reform advocates may be gaining the upper hand now in Bahrain. It's a rather pleasant thought that the ideas of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., may turn out to be a more effective tool for democratic reform than bombing countries back into the Stone Age. I fear there's a long way to go until we know how this will all turn out, but I wish them all well, especially the protesters in Iran and Libya.

GOP Budget Slashing in the US House of Representatives -- Well, it sure looks like the freshman Tea Partiers had fun on Capital Hill last week. It'd be fun to sort through the details, but overall it looked to me like an exercise in defunding a long list of Republicans pet peeves without actually addressing any of the real causes of structural federal budget deficits. After the last election I thought we'd have an enormous government-shutdown train wreck at the start of the next budget year, but it looks as if the train wreck will happen even sooner than I thought, with the debt-ceiling bill. Frankly, I expect a long, ugly shutdown that will wreak true damage on the economic recovery. I hope I'm wrong.

Wisconsin Union Busting -- So, let me get this straight. The governor of Wisconsin has decided that instead of renegotiating contracts, just flat-out banning public employee unions is the best way to pay for the $100-million-plus in tax cuts for businesses that Wisconsin enacted a few months ago. Well, at least he's made it clear that he considers union-busting to be more important than actual fiscal reform. I hope he enjoys the general strike that seems to be looming.

One More Thought On the Last Two Items -- Since tax revenues are now the lowest percentage of GDP since the Eisenhower Administration, and since union membership is at its lowest point since the 1930s, is it just barely possible that tax cuts and union busting isn't really a good prescription for national prosperity? It doesn't seem to be working out all that well so far. Just a thought.

Governor Snyder's Proposed Michigan Budget -- I'm really of a mixed mind here. On the one hand I really admire Snyder for finally rolling out something that looks to me (at first glance, anyway) like an actual balanced budget that doesn't rely on gimmicks and fiscal chicanery. On the other hand, as near as I can tell, it looks to me as if it pays for a billion dollars in business tax cuts by raising taxes on the poor by $330 million with the elimination of the earned-income tax credit (EITC) and by adding somewhere around a billion dollars in tax revenue by taxing pensions, which were exempted from taxation in the 90s during the Engler administration. I would bemoan the removal of the last $300 million of legislative municipal revenue sharing, but that always seemed a foregone conclusion to me.

It would be pretty easy to be cynical about those proposed vast shifts of taxation from corporations onto the backs of the poor and elderly, and to say that apparently according to the GOP tax hikes are only bad when they're on businesses or the wealthy.

But I think I'm going to hope that the legislative process works to correct some of the worst of the proposed budget -- especially the EITC removal. There's a lot to like in a budget process that at least attempts to deal with the real long-term numbers. Snyder at least seems open to suggestions. And unlike the Republicans in D.C. and in Wisconsin, he doesn't seem to be trying to use genuine budget issues to hammer home a long wish list of partisan policies. This gives me some hope that we may see something genuinely good for Michigan come out of this. We may even see genuine healthy debate about government spending priorities, something that seems in short supply elsewhere these days.

We shall see.