• Part-time legislature with part-time salaries (strange that it wasn't on your list)

• Reduce legislative staff (The legislators earn enough money to pitch in and help answer constituent requests)

• Freeze or reduce salaries for legislative staff

• Increase health care contribution from legislators and legislative staff

• End lifetime health care benefits for legislators

• Implement Medicaid Estate Recovery program
  

+ Eliminate all tax abatements.
Revenue generated can be used to reduce overall tax rates. Business environment will improve as companies see that no one company gets preferential treatment over competitors.

"Consolidate Departments- HAL/DIT/DNR/DEQ"

How in the world does that save any money? Those departments, with perhaps the exception of DEQ and DNR have almost no overlap in services.

"Reign in state contracts:    All told information and technology contracts alone have ballooned by over $1.67 BILLION."

Of course we need to spend money on technology.  But we don't need to be throwing away $1.67 BILLION MORE than we contract for.

That's a sign of government run amok and a complete lack of oversight.

And it's ONE example.  Who knows what else is out there... typically where there's smoke there's fire.

$1.67 BILLION.

$1,670,000,000.

167000000000 pennies.

To paraphrase the great John McClane:

I was promised that I'd be blown away.

Liberals are quick to call Bush a liar,  but defend their own flock.

I'm unconvinced a part-time legislature would solve anything.  Everyone was pretty keen on term limits but that seems to have backfired.

Term limits were never proposed to solve a budget crisis.

I believe state legislators should be full-time.  How many and what caliber of people do you suspect can make that kind of part-time commitment?

Actually, the idea is that MORE people would be able to join the legislature when it's part-time.  A full-time legislature requires people who are independently wealthy - after spending 6 years in the house, where do you go next?  8 years in the Senate?  And then your old job skills are 14 years out-of-date.

Try asking your boss if you could take 1/2 year off and see if they don't think about replacing you.

Good point, but that half year doesn't have to be six months straight.  Try asking for 6 years off, and then trying to get your old job back when you're done.  Hope you invested that Legislature paycheck wisely!

Now, if we instead think a shorter sessions would save money on its own, that may make sense.  But we should at least consider the more idle time politicians have the more trouble they can get into.  Heck, they could become 365-day/year fund raisers and near impossible to displace as incumbents--then you're back to term limits.

Rumor has it, a full-time legislature is already a 365-day fundraiser.  You have lobbyists and PACs all lined up to take you to lunch and dinner.  Fundraising isn't dependent upon how much the politician works... even while he's in session, he can have people fundraising for him.  So this is a kind of null argument.  

The people control incumbency.  The people vote politicians out of office repeatedly.  The fact we went to term-limits is ridiculous.  There were other good reforms enacted at the same time (taking away "lifetime" paychecks for politicians... John Engler is raking in almost $350k from his prior jobs in Lansing).  

"The proof to me is in the $1.8 billion deficit," Rep. Andy Meisner (D-Ferndale) said. "The end result has been a fiscal disaster and a situation where middle- and low-income families have been short-shifted."

What jumped out at me immediately wasn't the Democrat-slamming-Engler quote.  It's that, since 2003, we've been facing the same $1.8 billion "budget deficit".

I don't agree with the premise, and certainly not with Liz Brater's "tax structure" argument...

But what really stands out is that we've had this problem since January 2003.  4.5 years later, Two-Penny Jenny has still not resolved it.  Instead, she's put the state in even greater peril.  Borrowing until the state's Credit Card is maxed out, and still hasn't fixed any of the "structural problems"

So if this really was a problem that Grandmole inherited, why isn't it fixed yet?  Bush is in a quagmire in Iraq, but Granholm is just along for the ride in Michigan?