I was a supporter of Proposal 1 here in Michigan, and it just went down in flames. A little perspective -- I moved to Michigan two years ago and if Prop 1 had never been an issue I probably wouldn't have noticed, or even been able to tell you what Michigan's sales tax was. (For what it's worth, I grew up in Texas, where state plus local sales tax is 8.25%, so 7% didn't seem all that bad.)
And now things are, theoretically, just the same as they were yesterday.
Except we've just had a season of people from governess to governor complaining about the state of Michigan's roads, so it's in the air that there's a need to be filled, but apparently not that way; 'that way' being a long, complicated ballot proposal, but in the shorthand that will probably get used to talk about it in political circles and state media, 'that way' will probably be 'by taxing.'
So the response to this perceived need will be the Bolger plan, or Colbeck's package: cut a bunch of other things to shove money in to roads, at best doing nobody any net good and probably causing a significant amount of pain where education and social programs are cut back.
The slim, competing possibility, perhaps something that I can glimpse out of the corner of my eye, calls for a united, loud voice, saying: NO, we do not want cuts to education, we do not want social programs cut. We want the tax giveaways Michigan has been giving to corporations in recent years to get rolled back. Use that to fund transportation investment. We need to make sure that this plan is in the conversation, that any Republican legislator who votes for cuts to programs when corporate tax fairness was in the cards has to justify their choice in front of the voters next year.
