A standing-room only crowd of some 250 diverse citizens, community leaders, elected officials, educators and business people attended the Center for Michigan’s “Kitchen Table Talk on Michigan’s Public Purse.”
This town hall meeting featured expert presentations, open discussion, and audience voting on some of the toughest questions policymakers face in Lansing today. Here’s how audience members voted…
4 Comments
OK, a number of polls were taken. Individually, they seem like separate primary elections, each with a result. It seems that the “winning” result of each should be made into another poll to achieve a consensus for one winning, priority one item that needs to be legislated to get Michigan out of the recession.
For example, increasing the number of graduate engineers or CPAs without a growing economy is a losing proposition. Michigan would be and is an education factory for exporting most of the college graduates to other states. For another, Michigan does not get a rising tax revenue stream without a growing economy. What must be done to give Michigan a growing economy?
Use these thought experiments to pick winning poll entries.
Interesting to see the 0% desire to increase property taxes. It may have made sense at one time, but makes no sense to have that be the primary support for local governments now. The simple fact is that “property value” is an abstraction that doesn’t translate into funds with which to pay taxes.
It’s a bit disappointing to see sales/service tax favored, since such taxes tend to be regressive.
How’s this as an idea to simplify Michigan’s tax system: abolish all business, property, sales, and state income tax; whatever a business, family, or individual owes on their Federal tax, the state tax is a fixed percentage of that. Of course the federal system isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty clear we can’t do any better, so why not make it that simple for all concerned?
In my opinion, Michigan needs a two percent service tax (movies, haircuts etc). This will grow some funds that will offset the deficits until we find a common sense tax. Michigan has become a service state and a service tax makes sense. Hopefully we can start building and growing things in the near future.
Mr Karl has hit on the most important thing the state can do. That is do what it takes to grow our economy. What is the true reduction we have in jobs and the pay for the jobs we are getting to replace the lost ones. As the working peoples standard of living comes down the state spending will have to come down. You can’t keep taxing people out of their standard of living and keep them in Michigan.