Thursday, March 17, 2011

Outrageous Statement of the Day

On his MSNBC show, Ed Schultz says that Tea Party members who support Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder are "lining up with the Communist Party."

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1 comment:

  1. JohnnyKMarch 18, 2011 at 4:27 PM

    Here is a little explanation of the Michigan thing.

    I completely agree in principle with the view on removing elected officials things but things are not as simple as this "reporter", Snyder or just about any news organization would suggest. The opposing option is that elected officials can continue to do their jobs atrociously, as long as the people keep re-electing them, forcing their locality into bankruptcy and become a massive drain on the states' bottom line for individuals who had no say whatsoever in their election (i.e. taxation without representation). Since neither one of these are acceptable solutions we must be prudent on how we implement recourse and respect the will of the people.

    To state that this bill gives the power to the governor to remove elected officials is pure idiocy as that power has already been in place since 1988, but that says nothing of whether that power should have been granted in the first place. What the bill DOES is move from a postmortum approach to a preemptive approach which certainly has some negatives and transfers more power to the governor. However this power transfer is intended to uphold the constitutional requirement of maintaining a balanced budget and to look at what the governor is doing in any frame of mind other than the constitution is unhelpful. It must also be kept in mind that the most controversial decisions are protected by votes of the people (e.g. school district consolidation) and that elected officials are not so much removed as stripped of many of their powers over finances which they have proven irresponsible at.

    Lastly and most importantly we must recognize that we have made the assumption that many services will be provided by the government, many of which are likely the best options (e.g. law enforcement), but this necessitates the conflict between balancing a budget and respecting the sovereignty of individual locales and the will of the people.

    So as I said this is a prudential decision as bankruptcy hurts everyone, especially those contracted with the bankrupt entity, and preempting financial review will certainly ward off more bankruptcies but this is done at the cost of transferring more power to the state from local entities. It seems the most common ground solution would be to provide strengthened local control over the removal and replacement of local officials. The only other option I can see to respect the local voters and prevent bankruptcies would be to reduce the services we rely upon government to provide but this would run counter to what we assume the government would provide.

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