Archive for the ‘Dan Calabrese’ Category

Dan Calabrese

I understand that John Dingell considers it his job to cheerlead for the domestic auto industry. And I suppose it’s not that big a deal when he comes forth with exaggerated indignation any time someone makes a criticism of it.

But does Dingell actually know anything about the industry? Or is he merely steeped in the conventional wisdom that informs political types, even if it is completely unrelated to the truth?

An astoundingly ignorant statement he released last week leads me to think that Dingell sees the auto industry through the prism of political fantasyland.

On Thursday, I received a press release from Dingell, excoriating Mitt Romney for saying on a Boston radio station that the Chevy Volt is “an idea whose time has not come.” That is all Romney said, as the question was asked during the final seconds of the interview and there was no time for him to expand on his answer.

Dingell’s press release, as you might imagine, rips Romney for his dastardly attack on all that is good and decent, reminding us that Romney wrote an op-ed in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” (which GM and Chrysler did, by the way, likely prolonging their lives as a result) and accusing him of wanting to “surrender the advanced vehicle market to foreign manufacturers.”

Yeah yeah. This sort of bluster is standard fare for Big Jawn.

But as you read through the press release, you come to this gem (emphasis mine):

“Romney is the only fellow in the United States who appears to think that the Volt is an idea whose time has not come. Clearly it has not come to him,” said Michigan Congressman John Dingell. “The Volt is selling like hotcakes.”

Um, yeah . . . excuse me. It’s what?

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Dan Calabrese

When Gov. Snyder announced in February that he would be ending film incentives in their current form, inspiring shrieks of indignation from Mitch Albom and others who understand nothing about where jobs come from, he said he would replace the $100 million annual program with a $25 million fund that could be used to subsidize certain projects that would qualify.

So it’s not huge news that he did so yesterday. The new film incentive program authorizes the Michigan Film Office to provide subsidies for film projects that spend at least $100,000 in Michigan and create a certain number of jobs.

At the same time, Snyder authorized the Michigan Economic Growth Authority to negotiate incentives for the development of advanced battery facilities. The incentives are more limited than what the state used to bestow upon this favored industry, and are tied to more stringent job-creation requirements, but like the film incentives, the battery industry giveaways still have a pulse.

Sigh.

I guess this just means that it’s almost impossible to end government meddling in the economy entirely. I suspect that would have been Snyder’s preference, but politicians (even conservative Republicans with their oh-so-principled devotion to the free market) love to be able to say they did something to create jobs.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s hard to overstate the evil that spewed forth from the now-departed monster Kim Jong Il – a man so loathsome he thought nothing of whisking away his subjects for a lifetime of hard labor and torment at the very mention of any dissent.

And there was much from which to dissent during his 20-year reign of terror in North Korea, where his only real objectives as a “leader” were to keep his people in the dark (which he achieved nicely both literally and intellectually) while continuing to extort economic assistance out of his communist Chinese patrons and gullible western leaders who somehow thought they could buy his acquiescence on matters such as nuclear nonproliferation or basic adherence to human rights.

What a shame it is that Kim died on this particular weekend (not that he died at all – that is a glorious development) when the world’s attention belongs rightly on the passing of a great man like Vaclav Havel, an international hero of democracy as my colleague Jocelyn Benson said so well earlier this morning.

Then again, the demise of the tyrant Kim reminds us of why the world needs heroes like Havel. It’s the advocates of freedom and liberty who show true courage, especially in places that are not inherently friendly to these ideals.

It required no courage, no character, no commitment to be Kim Jong Il. He did not have to earn his mantle of leadership. Once upon it, he did not have to lead. He did not have to work for the consent of the governed. He did not have to level with his people about what he was doing, why he was doing it or what effect it would have on them.

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Dan Calabrese

The difficult question when wrestling with Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager law is this: It is troubling that the decisions made by local citizens are essentially trumped by the governor, who sends someone in from the outside to overrule every decision local officials have made about how they will handle the city’s finances.

That bothers me. It bothers a lot of people.

But the governor was elected too, and it’s also his responsibility to look out for the taxpayers in every one of our state’s cities. So when local officials show themselves to be so irresponsible that there is simply no one else to represent the interests of the taxpayers, maybe they should be grateful the governor is willing to act on their behalf.

The Detroit City Council’s refusal to make a reasonable cut to its own budget, at a time when the city is just months away from complete fiscal oblivion, presents one such conundrum.

Granted, the budget of the City Council is nowhere near the biggest part of Detroit’s woes. You could cut the Council’s budget to zero and Detroit would still be on the brink of fiscal oblivion if it can’t shed legacy costs born of the contracts it negotiated with its 48 employee unions.

But when you find yourself in a fiscal crisis – a word that hardly seems to cut it here – you can only solve the problem by making adjustments anywhere and everywhere you can. You don’t make a choice between large cuts and smaller ones. You make them all. And that’s because your only way out of this mess is to change the way you think – and apply your newfound sanity across the board.

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Dan Calabrese

It would really be a shame if Michigan Republicans – having won complete control of state government and a golden opportunity to re-shape the state’s economic policies – instead wasted all their political capital on social nonsense.

Worse yet would be if they perpetrated this idiocy, and further eroded their credibility by thinly claiming they were doing it as a money-saving measure.

But that’s exactly what they’re doing.

On a mostly party-line vote, the Legislature has passed a ban on the extension of employee benefits to unmarried “domestic partners” of public employees. Let’s put that in plain, if un-PC, English: If you’re shacking up, you don’t get added to the benefit package. And if you’re gay – since it’s not legal in Michigan for you to marry your same-sex significant other – you’re out of luck too.

This, according to bill sponsor State Rep. Dave Agema (R-Grandville, and also my representative), is designed to save the state money, because benefits are expensive. And yes they are, which is why it makes sense to devise a strategy that significantly cuts into the cost of providing them.

This isn’t it.

The state has more than 33,000 employees. Last year – the first year it was possible for employees to sign up their “domestic partners” for benefits, a whopping 138 did so. So if you’re looking for savings, keep looking.

Actually, I’ll tell you where to look. At major Michigan universities, more than 2,000 employees have signed up their “domestic partners” for employee benefits in the decade or so since they’ve been offered. So there’s some savings!

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Dan Calabrese

I smell a rat. It’s coming from the Coleman A. Young Municipal Building, and while that may not sound like any great revelation, I smell a very particular kind of rat. And it’s coming from Mayor Dave Bing.

Think about this: Bing gets up a couple of weeks ago, in the face of a budget crisis so severe that it threatens to all but destroy Detroit as a viable municipal entity, and he proposes a series of timid half-measures that everyone knows will not solve the problem.

This is not Kwame Kilpatrick. This is a guy who successfully built and ran his own business. This is a guy who understands fiscal reality.

Remember when Bing was campaigning? He made it clear to the city’s 48 public employee unions that if they did not make the necessary concessions, he was willing to throw the city into bankruptcy as the only way to rip up their contracts and get the city on a new footing.

Now all he offers up is a heaping helping of nothing? And when Gov. Rick Snyder moves ever-closer to appointing an Emergency Financial Manager to clean up this mess, all Bing can do is counter with an ineffectual plea that Detroit needs to be run by Detroiters?

Isn’t this the same guy who just a few months ago said that he wouldn’t mind getting the appointment as Detroit’s EFM? Now Bing, with the same private sector background he brought to the job in the first place, has suddenly transformed into a weak wet noodle who is content to fiddle while Detroit burns?

Are you buying this?

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Dan Calabrese

I wrote a few weeks back that I haven’t watched any of the Republican presidential debates thus far. That surprised a lot of people who assume a) I’m a political junkie who can’t get enough of this stuff; and b) I’d be glued to the set rooting for my friend Herman Cain.

The truth is that it was excruciating for me, even when Herman was soaring in the polls, to watch him go through this game show/beauty pageant of a contest. For those who don’t know, I have been the syndicator of Herman’s newspaper column for six years (yes, he still writes it every week, and did so throughout his campaign). So I got plenty of opportunities to talk to him regardless.

If I wanted to know how he was doing, I could ask him. I didn’t need to see him up on some stage answering Wolf Blitzer’s idiot question about whether he prefers Elvis or Johnny Cash.

The hardest thing about seeing a friend of yours run for president was not the scandalous allegations, although that was hard. It’s just that the allegations were so absurd for anyone who knows him, they were honestly more a source of amusement than anything else. Thinking of Herman fooling around on Gloria or grabbing some woman’s crotch in a car – it was like trying to imagine Kwame Kilpatrick taking responsibility for something. You just couldn’t.

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Dan Calabrese

Here’s something that’s happening in a certain state:

The Legislature has instituted a 3 percent tax on salaries, which applies only to certain people. The courts have declared the tax illegal, but the administration is appealing the ruling. While the case is on appeal, the state is continuing to collect the tax and deposit it in escrow accounts while it waits for a ruling from the state Supreme Court.

The opposition party in the Legislature is demanding that the administration drop the appeal and return the money to the taxpayers. It says there is $500 million in the escrow account.

So! Which state’s Democratic governor is trying to keep collecting a tax that’s already been ruled illegal? Which state’s brave group of Republican legislators has stood up for the rights of taxpayers, who are having money taxed from them in spite of the legal problems associated with the tax?

Ha! It’s a trick question!

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Dan Calabrese

I don’t know exactly how much money Fred Meijer left behind when he departed this world last week, but I’d proffer a reasonable guess that it was enough to make him part of the dastardly “1 percent.”

You know: Them. Ask any Occupy Wall Streeter about them. They make too much, horde too much and keep other poor saps toiling in subjection to The Man. They’re jerks.

Of course, when they die, it’s customary to regale them with compliments, and the usual media approach to this – certainly in full force in the case of Fred Meijer – is to praise him for that portion of his wealth he gave away in the form of philanthropy, sponsorships and what-have-you. This, we are told, represents his impact on the world around him.

But that’s a load of crap.

Fred Meijer’s impact on the world around him is not represented by his establishment of the Meijer Botanical Gardens, nor by any of his philanthropic giving. These are all well and good, but let’s be real here. Meijer impacted the communities in which he operated, and brought the greatest benefit to these communities, through the profitable operation of the stores that bear his name.

The OWS crowd considers it an article of faith that 1 percenters like Fred Meijer hurt others by amassing more than their share of wealth.

But the manner in which Fred Meijer amassed his wealth brought massive benefits to the communities where his stores operated – not because he was a nice or generous guy necessarily (although he may well have been), but because he understood what you have to do to earn money.

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Dan Calabrese

One of Detroit’s biggest problems right now is the fact that things in the city were once so good. When times are good, politicians tend to create institutions – cheered on by the people – that are easy to support as long as the prosperity continues, but become anvils around the neck when things change.

And things always change, sometimes with alarming speed. That’s when trouble starts, because politicians are almost never willing to make adjustments with the same speed, and sometimes they’re not willing to recognize reality at all.

The sad fiscal implosion of Detroit makes it hard to believe there was ever a time when the city could balance a budget, operate efficiently and provide quality public services to the people who lived and worked within its boundaries.

But there was. A history lesson doesn’t do any good if it’s just a recounting of events, but if Detroit is going to fix its problems, people need to understand how and when it should have made adjustments. In a city where things were once peachy, it’s easier to pretend things are just as peachy as ever than to deal with things as they are.

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