If you've been following the Proposal 1 debacle for any length of time (or read my last article on it), you've probably become desensitized to the constant threats of falling concrete and overly sensational TV ads about how drivers will swerve into school buses to avoid potholes if you don't approve this, and radio spots about how your young student drivers are at risk and WHY DO YOU HATE THE CHILDREN, which clearly was a message that voters haven't been fazed by, if the polls have been any indication.
Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that it's hard to deploy such tactics when less than 20% of money raised by the proposed solution actually goes to roads in the first year. Because these roads will kill you if you don't give us more money now, but... eh, we still can wait a couple years to actually fix them.
And people wonder why Michigan voters are so damn cynical.
Having failed at that attempt to pull at your non-child-hating heartstrings, it didn't take long for Proposal 1's supporters to end the ongoing doomshow about how deadly our roads are, and skip right ahead to blasting their opponents as uninformed whiners.
For example, as I started writing this last night, I also made the mistake of listening to 97.1 The Ticket's Eric Thomas, who never found an argument he couldn't reduce to "if you disagree with me, you're just a whiner/moron!" ET started off his show by declaring that those opposed to Proposal 1 are "low-information voters" and giving the sort of insight one would expect from a man who once worked for a year as a traffic reporter in DC and is therefore the preeminent expert on economic policy. Which is to say, the documented fact that Proposal 1 also generates $600 billion in non-road spending was met with "No that's not true. It's just not." And nothing further to back up that point.
But the worst offender, by a long shot, is this condescending screed by the Freep's Brian Dickerson, who has decided that the problem is not that this bill is needlessly complicated, nor that the state legislature can't simply do the job that we elected them to do, nor that somehow this state can afford $1.8 billion in corporate tax cuts while those corporations are benefiting from the same infrastructure as the rest of us, but is asking voters to accept a regressive tax increase that will hit lower-income taxpayers hardest of all.
No, according to Dickerson, the problem is that Michiganders are 'bitter, self-pitying whiners' who won't 'take care of their own property.' Of course, if Dickerson were actually paying attention instead of thinking up clever insults like "Michissipians" (whatever the hell that even means) and making strawman arguments about how we the taxpayers refuse to pay our fair share, he'd have known that the issue was never about not wanting to pay to fix roads, but rather not accepting a terribly crafted bill that likely won't fix anything anyway, when better options exist.
It didn't have to come to this. The House last year approved a plan to fix roads without this additional tax increase, by simply changing how new tax revenue was spent. And with an increase of $4.5 billion in annual spending since Rick Snyder took office, it's not as though there wasn't money to work with. Funny how there was plenty of money to 'fix' the Michigan Business Tax, but none to be found for the roads.
The idea that Michiganders want roads fixed for 'free' is beyond ridiculous. As though the fuel tax doesn't exist, nor any of the current tax money that's supposed to be used for roads. How can anyone legitimately suggest that it's somehow not the legislature's job to prioritize spending and re-allocate funding as needed? Is that not what they were elected for?
And the claim that "there is no plan B" if this fails is falling on deaf ears as well. In fact, there's been several proposed alternatives once this mess of a bill is shot down for good, most of which are far better than this travesty. Even the straight fuel tax increase proposed last year sounds infinitely more reasonable than what we're being asked to buy today.
By the end of today, it appears that Michigan voters will have finally decided that threats, scare tactics, and politicians and talking heads alike lecturing from on high to us like we're children, aren't effective strategies in selling us on their snake oil.
Maybe now a legitimate solution can be found.
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