Tag Archives: Mike Bishop

Governor Granholm & Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop: Awkward

This week Michigan House Republicans presented their plan to solve the State’s budget problems: cut state worker salaries. They proposed cutting state the salaries of 52,000 state employees by 5% and reduce the benefits for retirees. Additionally, they called for a 5% across the board cut in state spending.

This plan is completely shameful for two reasons.

1) Asking state employees to accept a 5% cut in their salaries is highly hypocritical considering not a single House Republican will voluntary return a percentage of their own income, as Governor Granholm does.

Granholm, a Democrat, has returned 5 percent or 10 percent of her $177,000 salary every year since taking office in 2003 as Michigan has struggled with a weak economy and ongoing budget problems. She recently urged other elected officials to do the same, especially lawmakers since they have so much say in the state budget.

Not a single House Republican has returned any portion of his or her income. How can you ethically ask the people that clean up our parks, guard our prisons, and pave our roads to take a cut in pay when you yourself refuses to even consider the notion.

2) A 5% cut across the board is fundamentally the worst plan that could be proposed to fix our state budget. Across The Board cuts class funding from efficient programs, thus making making them inefficient, and fails to fix inefficient programs. These cuts allow inefficient programs to continue to exist, but in a small form.

In a recession good government programs are essential to creating and economic turn around, but wantonly slashing funding merely handicaps these programs.

Partaking in a bipartisan effort to address inefficient programs in a direct manner addresses the problem and will hopefully bring about reform to programs that desperately need it.