Amber Arellano

Don't pit working families against school children in budget battle

Pitting poor working families against school children is about as low as you can get in politics, but that's exactly what Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop is doing. This is a sign of how far we have fallen in Michigan. Our leaders have failed to do their jobs for eight consecutive years and now they want to take it out on our state's most vulnerable citizens: children and poor folks.

That is essentially what Bishop, R-Rochester, is proposing. Bishop has called on the state House to vote for Senate-approved bills that would freeze the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), among other measures, to raise $100 million for schools. The EITC is a tax break for working poor families. To understand how critical the EITC is to a working family today, you need to know how messed up the state's tax system is.

In recent years Michigan has become known as one of the worst states for working lower-income people. We heavily tax working poor folks, while letting Bloomfield Hills and Ann Arbor families (myself included) skate by in comparison. Until recently, Michigan had the nation's third-highest tax on a single parent of two children living in poverty.

With the help of the EITC -- which rewards work, a Republican mantra -- the state moved to 31st place, according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If Bishop has his way, Michigan will fall back to its former shameful status.

Equal guilt

To be sure, Bishop alone is hardly responsible for the current state budget dilemma. The Democrats are just as responsible. They knew it was coming; they've had eight years to deal with it and never did anything. Next year will be much worse.

Extremists on both sides of the political aisle are driving this crisis. Conservative Republicans refuse to do anything to help raise revenues. If that's the case, dear lawmakers, then you've got to make cuts. You can't have it both ways. And you know it.

Yet that's precisely what Bishop is trying to do. He complains constantly about how unfair Granholm's cuts are to schools, acting as if he is the one who is getting hurt by state budget cuts when he is the one proposing to damage people. This is nuts. There are plenty of other fat cows to cut before gutting poor folks' grocery budgets.

Here's where the Democrats and the education establishment are to blame. The Michigan Education Association teachers' union and its allies refuse to support cost-cutting reforms while school districts pay for inappropriate benefits, such as massages for its members. The result: classrooms suffer.

So now when the going gets very tough, both sides want to do what's easiest: blame one another, whine like bratty children and work to undermine kids' classrooms and poor working families.

Could these people get any lazier and more ridiculous? The budget crisis requires all of us to step up and make sacrifices. That means we need a mix of reforms (say, in school employee health care), cuts and revenues. Yes, that means lawmakers such as Bishop need to support tax reforms, and (gasp!) get over their avoidance of raising revenues. There are reasonable ways to do that, without hurting job creation or poor children.

Outmoded tax system

Michigan's tax system, stuck in the 1950s, needs to move to a modern sales tax base and graduated income tax, and tax services such as pedicures and dry cleaning. These taxes would disproportionately burden women (how many men get pedicures, really?).

So let's go for some gender balance here. The beer tax has not been adjusted in decades. In comparison to other solutions, protecting the Earned Income Tax Credit makes a lot of sense. Overwhelming research shows when poor and working-class families get a tax break, they spend the money immediately -- on food, children's clothes, real needs -- unlike wealthier families. Thus, such tax breaks are highly effective economic stimuli.

God knows Michigan needs that.

Detroit News editorial writer Amber Arellano writes a weekly column on culture and politics. E-mail her at: aarellano@detnews.com