Dear Sen. Bishop,

Please do not cut funding to education or transportation.  Education, including the MI Promise, is crucial to our state’s future.  Cutting it will doom everything else we are doing.

Transportation funding, namely the CTF, should not be cut to make up deficits in the general fund.  When I fill up, I want my taxes to fix the road i’m driving on, the bridge i’m driving over, or the bus i’m driving in.

I hope you will seriously consider revenue enhancements.  Actually, to
hell with nuances: RAISE MY TAXES.  I believe that in MI you pay for what you get.  I want MORE.  I want transit like other states have, I want nice bridges, nice roads, nice cities, and quality services.

When we over-fund programs, money is inevitably wasted.  However, when we habitually underfund programs, ALL of the funding is wasted.  What good is a half-filled pot hole?  A half-salted roadway?  A school with 38 kids per class?  A center median with chemical growth retardants rather than a lawn-mower!?

We elect you to make the tough decisions that we don’t want to make because we are too busy working.  Please get your colleagues into line.  It is foolish and naive to think we can cut our way out of this budget nightmare. You can’t cut funding and expect to get the same services.  Tell your colleagues that we DON’T want a cut in services.

By dipping from the CTF, all you are doing is perpetuating a broken tax system.  We over-tax small and large businesses alike, and we keep making these un-indexed taxes like those on gas and beer and expect them to last long.

When this mess is over, your job is not.  Get in front of this issue, start talking about restructuring the tax system in our state.  I trust you have the backbone to take on these systemic problems head-on, i worry some of your colleagues may not.  It is VERY easy to hide behind dogmatic chants like “cut taxes” or “no new taxes, we’ll cut the fat”, but for those of us who live in the real world, there are no more cuts to be made without SERIOUSLY jeopardizing the quality of services we have.

If we keep on going as we have, we’ll cut ourselves into the stone-age; and nobody in the legislature will remember what went wrong because all of you will be term-limited by then.

Best,

Joe Manzella