Over the past few months I’ve been at the forefront of Michigan’s budget battle witnessing first hand the bitter partisan politics that drive the Great Lakes state. Michigan is well known these days a the state that shut down two out of the past three years due to budget woes, but to say that partisan bickering is a purely Michigan problem would be false. It’s a horrible disease that is strangling our democracy and producing budget shutdowns in states like Michigan, California, and Pennsylvania, and producing lackluster results for citizens that deserve much better. It’s hard to find one root cause of these problems, but I want to focus on term limits and the major headache they’ve created for state legislatures across the nation as they struggle to understand their job and the powers that come with it.

A Purposefully Inaccurate, yet Telling Measurement of Partisan Alignment

At the end of the 1980s the idea that government was bad continued to ring out across our nation. The message of former President Ronald Reagan resonated with a new era of politicians. They found it disgusting that someone could make a career out of public service and civic duty and they were determined to change the way government worked. They were going to make government work for the people.

Noble? In some respect.

But as we’ve seen over the past fifteen plus years it hasn’t cut down on corruption. Instead states like Michigan, a state that passed term limits in 1992, simply created a revolving door of legislators. It didn’t end career cronyism; it merely created a set career path for the power hungry. Today, instead of getting to know the inner workings of the House or Senate chamber, our politicians merely act in a way that will get them elected to a higher office when their term expires or that will get them a cushy job as a lobbyist following their stint in the state capitol. Instead of weighing their conscious before a vote, they weigh their political capital. Gone is the day of bipartisanship, now reigning is a capitol catfight to the top. Any legislator that does get a hang of the system is either swallowed up in partisan games or merely swept out of Lansing thanks to the cap our state has placed on institutional knowledge.

I’ve read in many editorials that Michigan should cut legislative salaries and push a new budget deadline. These solutions won’t save very much money and the bottom line is that they won’t work because they will not create the environment that is needed to pass a budget. While term limits may mix up the legislature every two years, what they also do is block politicians from any opportunity to learn on the job or build any sort of coalition with other representatives beyond party label.

That’s the problem.

At a time when our state faces great crises our politicians must learn to work together. Unless politicians from both sides of the isle learn to cooperate with each other we will continue to see the partisan battles that have taken place over the past decade. If our politicians were smart, they would work together. If voters were smart, they would repeal legislative term limits.

Alexander Morgan blogs regularly at abmichigan.blogspot.com.

This little note has a thesis. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a love story had one too.

I’m a conservative, sort of. I say sort of because I happen to be more of a libertarian than what passes for a conservative these days. I had low expectations for Michael Moore’s thesis counterbalanced with his usual stream of consciousness cinematography and I was disappointed by neither. Allow me to summarize the film and save Shoemaker the problem of review it as an art piece: “blah blah I’m fat blah blah Rich people are mean blah blah don’t you agree with me?”

The film lacked a feasible argument, unlike Bowling for Columbine or Sicko. (That’s correct, I’m a card-carrying Republican and I’ve actually seen all of Michael Moore’s films.) Moore’s Capitalism: a love story ended with quotes from Jefferson and the elder John Adams, all the while neglecting the fact that both men participated in the foment of mercantile Capitalism in this country. Meanwhile, the film jumped from sob shot to sob shot, denigrating an economic downturn, neglecting to point out that that collapse was preceded by some of the largest and (excepting the post-9/11 market deflation) longest growth through which we all may ever live.
Moore sloshes blame on every president since Jimmy Carter (yes, even Tricky Bill), all the while trumpeting Franklin Roosevelt as the model on which the economy should have been predicated. We get shown image after image from the Bush Whitehouse, clearly the film’s real villain; Moore neglects to point out that the Spendmeister in Chief currently occupying that selfsame building rammed a stimulus package that would make the only Socialist in the Senate (Bernie Sanders from Vermont) blush and Andrew Jackson (himself a deficit-hawk and debt-reducing maestro) roll over in his cliché.

And then, just when it seems like a Michael Moore movie would pass without a GM reference, he trots out his old warhorse, attempting to equate GM’s collapse with the competition created by Capitalism. Competition which has been quieted by…bombs…lots and lots of bombs. Moore all the while argues for a similar bombing spree vis-à-vis a “peasant’s revolt”. That’s right: open revolution. Of course, he doesn’t want us to be irresponsible and actually kill congressmen (well, maybe all the Republican ones he didn’t interview), but just vote them out of office and vote in a Senate filled with Bernie Sanders.

Michael Moore Takes a Fallacious Peak at the Economy

Let me be clear: I don’t like recessions, nobody does. When recessions get bad, we call them depressions, which is pretty sensible considering that’s usually how we all feel during. The reason we’re having a recession, in a nutshell, is that everyone of the movers and shakers got excited about economic growth and let a bubble get so big that when it burst, everyone got gum in their face and hair. The beautiful thing about Capitalism is that it will come back, it will be fine. What the economy needs (and now I’m quoting South Park) is “people spending money”. The way people have money to spend is with lower taxes for the people who have less. That’s called Capitalism and it really is that simple, I promise.

Economic recovery takes time, that’s a hard reality. Nothing comes quickly. But we have to all keep trying; keep working;  keep doing whatever we can. Stan was right, spending money will bring some recovery. I bought my ticket, from which Michael Moore will get a nice fat cut (Irony, party of Moore?), and staged my own little “revolt” in the theater. A good many of us went, in varying stages and modes of intoxication, bought popcorn and sodas and pretended the movie was anything other than a fat man making money for being a Grumpapotamus. Of course…that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.