Boom, you just lost $1,000.
How would you and your family deal with the loss?
Would you slash your grocery budget by $20 each week?
Cancel your cellphone plan or do without home Internet access?
Would you skip a mortgage payment or two and risk foreclosure?
Stop picking up the prescription drugs you require to stay healthy?
Or would you have to stop making payments to your children’s college fund or be unable to help a parent in their twilight years?
You and your family may have to make these cuts soon.
During Michigan’s Lost Decade, families got far more used to tightening their belts than they liked. Now, as Mark Schauer — one of the chief architects of our lost decade — makes his pitch to become Michigan’s next governor, he’s dropped a bombshell on Michiganians in the form of a new plan for massive new government spending.
And he’s expecting you to pick up the tab.
Schauer released his so-called “Blueprint for Michigan” this summer, outlining his priorities including billions in new government spending.
While the media robustly criticized the document for lacking specifics, fiscal analysts began digging through it to find out what it might cost taxpayers.
A former House Fiscal Agency director pegged the new costs in Schauer’s plan at $2.2 billion per year.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank based in Midland, puts the price tag at between $2.4 billion and $3.7 billion annually.
(The Mackinac Center also noted that its estimate was “conservative,” citing at least a dozen additional new government programs or departments in Schauer’s plan with costs that were impossible to estimate.)
Assuming a slightly more conservative estimate is accurate, the math on that new spending comes out to a new $1,000 per year tax, per family, across the state of Michigan....
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