Snyder's Budget is not Outlandish

Governor Rick Snyder has proposed his first budget for the State of Michigan, proposing permanent cuts of around $1.2 billion dollars in a plan he defended as shared sacrifice. Schools and seniors, as well as state employees and localities, are being asked to make forms of concessions in order to make Michigan financially sound.

When you are losing people, you lose tax income. Michigan, being the only state which lost population in the 2010 Census, is hurt by that as well as the malaise of the larger economy. Sometimes you just have to cut, and Snyder is taking the correct approach that as many as possible should share the burden. Where he will surely be criticized the harshest will come in the areas of seniors and the schools. He is proposing that senior pensions be subject to tax, and he is asking for K-12 funding to be cut 4% while seeking a 15% cut from public universities.

Those ideas are not outlandish by any stretch of the imagination. Seniors statistically are the wealthiest in the population, and surely anybody can find waste and redundancy amounting to one twenty-fifth of their spending. And while a 15% slice from college funding may seem deep, part of the trouble there is that we have to think too highly of university training. A bachelor's degree has become the new GED, yet commonsense tells us that far too many jobs which currently demand college in truth do not merit such high requirements. What we need, quite frankly, is to stop making university such a big deal. The schools will surely survive anyway.

In all, the Governor's budget is a mix of cuts, what amounts to tax increases, and the elimination and/or privatization of state jobs. What it will be in the end remains to be seen, but it seems a fair balance of pain at this point.