Archive for the ‘Dan Calabrese’ Category

Dan Calabrese

Look out, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Raleigh. You could be next.

After touting the outcome of his decision (actually George W. Bush regrettably got the ball rolling) to bail out the Big Three, President Obama told the nation on Wednesday night that it doesn’t have to end there!

“What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries,” Obama beamed. “It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh.”

Leaving aside for a second that he also declared “no bailouts, no handouts and no copouts” (we will leave that aside because he certainly did not mean it), let’s consider what is happening in Detroit – and whether this is really what we want to see on a widespread basis across the nation.

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Dan Calabrese

Newt Gingrich may be a jerk, but his broadside against CNN’s John King in last week’s South Carolina debate was on target for more reasons than even he probably realizes.

I do not have any sympathy for Gingrich when it comes to his past marital infidelity. While no one knows the whole story of his marriage to former wife Marianne, we know enough just from what he’s admitted to fairly conclude that he was a pretty bad husband. Maybe she was a bad wife too – I don’t know – but she’s not running for president.

That said, King’s decision to open the debate with a question about Gingrich’s personal life was deplorable – not because it was hurtful to Gingrich, but because it was a complete waste of time in a forum that could be useful to the voters if only someone would have the nerve to kick the media out of it.

These are not debates. They are joint press conferences in which self-aggrandizing journalists pretending to be “moderators” ask questions with no purpose other than to provoke drama and force mistakes. There is almost nothing voters can learn from these events that will help them decide which candidate would make the best president.

There are several reasons for this, chief among them being the fact that members of the media are allowed to participate at all. The problem with the media moderators is not that they carry their liberal bias into the debate, although many do. The problem is that the moderators are so focused on asking “the tough questions” that they can’t create an atmosphere that allows for substantive discussion of issues.

There is a difference between a tough question and a question that allows you to learn something useful.

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Dan Calabrese

Today’s big news in Michigan is that we have a governor whose speeches lack both flair and specifics. Not only that, but in assessing the state’s condition, he denied Michigan residents a happy buzz by presenting as many remaining problems as signs of progress.

And to top it all off, he seems entirely unconcerned about improving his rhetorical skills, or about using his words to inspire.

That’s the kind of governor we now have. Excellent.

Maybe Rick Snyder knew before he delivered his State of the State address last night that the press corps would deride him for all of the above, and simply didn’t care. Maybe he remains so clueless about the realities of political discourse that he didn’t see the yawns and eye-rolls coming.

I’d say Michigan wins either way.

Chief executives who understand leadership and results know a few things. One is that you assess problems, develop solutions and roll out the solutions when they’re ready to be implemented. The fact that the calendar requires you to give a progress report/political speech on January 18 does not mean it’s a good idea to cram in the specifics of every initiative you might take by that date.

Snyder did his job last night by laying out where the state has made progress – unemployment down, budget balanced, tax code reformed – and by making it clear that we still need to address serious problems like crime and road funding. He did not concern himself with whether he deserves credit or blame for anything. That is not important.

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Dan Calabrese

You have to give Michigan Democrats credit for boldness. Proposing a state-funded foundation grant to pay the tuition of every student who comes out of Michigan’s K-12 system (or a percentage if they only spent part of their K-12 years here) is hardly a milquetoast proposal.

Democrats believe in public money going to public institutions, so it’s hard to imagine a proposal that makes more sense than this from their perspective. It would surely boost enrollment at all the state’s public universities, and would save the universities the trouble of coaxing the tuition money out of private individuals’ bank accounts.

So it’s hard to find fault with the idea if you buy this line of logic: A more highly educated workforce keeps job-creating companies here, and easier access to higher education keeps those workers in the state and ready to work.

Then again: Lots of workers means lots of jobs?

Let’s deconstruct this proposal a little, since you don’t have to peel off many layers to see the problem with the assumptions behind it, as well as the claims Democrats make for how it will be funded – and that’s where we’ll start.

According to the press release touting the “Michigan 2020” plan, the state could pay for this $9,575-per-student-per-year grant by “eliminating the ineffective tax loopholes that are carved out by special interest lobbyists, as well as cutting costs within the thousands of contracts that the state currently administers.”

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Dan Calabrese

It’s hard to believe Michigan voters would be so stupid as to legalize marijuana, as they may be asked to do via a ballot initiative later this year. But their track record is not encouraging.

You’d have to be stoned to believe that Michigan’s law permitting “medical marijuana” has been a success since voters passed it in 2008. Most communities (with the unsurprising exception of Ann Arbor) are doing anything they can to avoid being stuck with “dispensaries” within their boundaries. Studies show that most “patients” are not elderly cancer sufferers, but 20-somethings claiming non-disprovable conditions like “chronic pain.”

And of course, “compassion clubs” have formed where the “patients” get together and take their “medicine” en masse. Yeah. Just like people on Lipitor.

It’s obvious now to all but the determinedly delusional that this entire exercise was nothing more than a way for stoners to party with a note from their doctor. And now, pot fans are essentially admitting as much by coming forward with another initiative – this time to legalize marijuana entirely, without conditions, for anyone over 21.

The argument, of course, is that marijuana laws are “not working” because people still smoke pot, which is a standard that would render every law ever passed ineffective. But more specifically, the potheads argue that by legalizing the evil weed, we could deny drug dealers the profits, mainstream the sale of the drug, regulate it and tax it.

Just imagine the disappointed drug dealers, kissing their cash goodbye as 21-and-over stoners stream by the thousands into Walgreens to buy pot along with their Doritos, paying their taxes like good doobies (yeah, I meant to do that) and heading out into the sunshine as upstanding citizens.

There’s only one problem. That is not what would happen.

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Dan Calabrese

My left-leaning colleague and friend Eric Baerren (I think it’s OK to call the editor of Michigan Liberal “left-leaning”) came out over the weekend with a blog post that excoriates Republicans for attacks on unions – specifically in Michigan with respect to education, but also nationally with respect to most everything.

That’s pretty standard given Eric’s point of view, so there’s no sense trading big-picture talking points on the pros and cons of unions. But there was one point he made that I found pretty intriguing, and worth exploring. He put it thusly:

By the way, there’s a word that’s missing in all this … Finland. Anyone who’s followed education issues very closely has heard it, and it’s not because it’s some wacky bit of geography no one can find on a globe anymore. It’s a nation that has produced a super-effective education system. They’ve done it not by beating up their teachers or by privatizing it under the auspices of “choice” or by turning it into a consumer product where children are treated like customers, but by investing in it and treating teachers like respected professionals.

I have no idea what education in Finland is like. If it’s as good as Eric says, maybe my son should go to the University of Helsinki in seven years or so. But it’s worth considering that last line of his – “treating teachers like respected professionals.”

Presumably this suggests that we need to not only pay them well, but from the perspective of union supporters, that we need to stop scapegoating them. Eric makes a good point when he says that you’re in for trouble when you shove reforms down the unwilling throats of the very people you then hope will implement the reforms effectively.

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Dan Calabrese

The news that Michigan will likely end this year with a budget surplus of between $800 million and $1 billion is a mild surprise. But this isn’t: Constituencies across the state are responding to the news by making a predictable suggestion about what to do with the money.

“Give it to us!”

Sigh. No one ever said an entire state changes the way it thinks all at once.

As The Detroit News reported on Wednesday, the AARP wants the money returned to senior pension-recipients, who figure we should just go back to the system by which Michigan was one of only three states that had an income tax but exempted pension income from it. Michigan municipalities want the money sent to them in the form of revenue-sharing payments like we used to have in the old days.

This is just what one reporter came up with in an afternoon’s worth of reporting. Surely every other interest group in the state is preparing to make a claim on the loot.

And not to be outdone, the other side of the political spectrum is represented by knee-jerker Leon Drolet of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, who wants the money returned directly back to taxpayers.

Sure. This makes sense. If a state that struggles year in and year out to balance its budget, and remains mired in one of the worst economic environments in the nation, actually runs a surplus for once . . . but all means, give that surplus cash away immediately.

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Dan Calabrese

We’ve been here before, haven’t we? Just three years ago. The biggest factor that drove General Motors into bankruptcy wasn’t its slumping sales. It was the fact that GM was on the hook for lifetime health benefits for more than 100,000 retirees.

That’s more people than you’ve got on your entire payroll. They’re not doing anything for you at all, but every time they go to the doctor – and they’re old, so they go a lot – it’s on your dime. Maybe you’re not paying the bills directly, but you’re paying the insurance premiums. Any way you look at it, it’s a recipe for financial collapse.

But you’ll recall that promises of lifetime health benefits were very popular for large institutions to make in the 1980s. That’s when Ford and Chrysler negotiated deals with the UAW that were almost as generous as GM’s. The entire industry, in those days, set the stage for the near-death experience it went through in 2008 and 2009.

So no one should be surprised by what the Detroit News reported today about the biggest financial millstone around Detroit’s neck. The city has more than 20,000 retirees – as opposed to 12,300 current employees – who are still enjoying lifetime health benefits from the city. For those who retired in 1984 or earlier, the city has to pay 90 percent of coverage.

On an annual basis, this sucks up $300 million, or 25 percent, of the city’s $1.2 billion general fund. And you can add another $157.3 million, or 6.3 percent of the city’s total operating budget, that goes to other fringe benefits for retirees.

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Dan Calabrese

If Michigan Republicans are about to fumble away their leadership opportunity before it’s even really begun – and they just might – they will certainly not be the first of their kind. Just the latest, and one of the stupidest.

It’s not often one political party is handed so much power, it pretty much has free reign to do anything it thinks it should for the benefit of those it has been entrusted to govern. And on the rare occasions when this happens, it seems inevitable that the empowered party spends much of its political capital pandering to various constituencies by enacting nonsense that has long been demanded of them – thus ensuring a short reign and very limited achievement.

This is what happened to the Democrats on the national level in 2009, when they found themselves with huge majorities in both houses of Congress – a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, no less – and control of the White House.

The Democrats won because the voters were convinced that the Republicans did not have solutions for the collapsing economy and financial markets – and indeed, that Republican policies had helped to bring them about. Thus, Democrats had one mandate: Fix this.

They will argue that President Obama’s $862 billion stimulus package in the early months of his presidency was designed to do just that. I think it was done for other purposes, and I know it didn’t work, but at least they presented it as a solution to the problem at hand. That’s more than you can say for the passage of ObamaCare, one of the worst and most fiscally dishonest pieces of legislation ever passed by the Congress of the United States, and vehemently opposed by a majority of Americans both at the time of its passage and now.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s no small trick for Republicans, after President Obama thoroughly lost the nation’s confidence on health care policy, to go ahead and lose it even bigger. But they seem to be doing so, in large part because their own history of “reform” proposals doesn’t make a whole lot more sense than Obama’s.

The larger problem is that almost no one in the governmental/political realm gets health care right, because they all buy the premise that the primary objective should be insurance coverage – the more all-encompassing, the better – for everyone. And Republicans are finding it difficult to maintain the advantage Obama handed them on the issue because, until very recently, they believed and touted much of the same thinking that led to ObamaCare.

We all know that Mitt Romney’s biggest problem in the 2012 presidential race is the policy known as MassCare, which was implemented during his term as governor of Massachusetts. The lynchpin of MassCare is the very thing ObamaCare opponents are now challenging in federal courts – the mandate that everyone purchase health insurance.

But if MassCare’s insurance mandate is unlikely to derail Romney’s path to the nomination, that is due in no small part to the fact that Romney is hardly alone in his recent love of insurance mandates. Yesterday, ObamaCare supporters were gleefully sending around a video of Newt Gingrich, speaking in 2008, on why we needed a federal mandate for everyone to purchase health insurance – coupled with some sort of fee for those who did not.

In other words, the very same policy Obama signed into law, which Gingrich now claims to oppose.

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