Tag: federal

Certainly this is the premise which the main street fairness act is being pursued. It is a means under which sales nexus will be identified, and taxes would be collected for sales made online for anything coming into the state that was purchased online.  It has the support of our governor, and looks to be heavily pushed with the claim that even elected conservatives are interested in it.

Not this one.

This is another one of those deals where instead of removing the regulatory misery under which retailers and business owners operate, it is presumed the better way toward fairness is to inflict it upon as many others as possible.   They are suffering, so can you. Share the pain.  And our governor Rick Snyder is now embracing it.

What will this mean to online wholesalers like myself?

I will ultimately have to deal with a number of sales tax licenses and a nightmarish bureaucracy entanglement.  I will have to report to not only my own state, but others within this compact agreement to be able to ship within those states legally.  I will not be able to ship to my customer's customers in Michigan directly, without revealing the transparent drop ship patterns.  Other states that are not a part of the compact would have their own plans which would cause harm to my model (California is already doing this) by imposing their own nexus rules even possibly based on volume shipped to their states.

It will hurt folks using my business model from the crushing paperwork aspect alone.

Her economic development sense is not only deficient, but dangerous if anyone takes her seriously.  Her desperation to be seen as better than she was showed up as a comment on a blog as referenced by the CapCon story linked above.  

That comment? It was a reply to another knucklehead who cherry picked positive numbers from a recent fiscal presentation by the Senate Fiscal Agency. Those numbers of course without the benefit of comparative perspective or further analysis. Analysis that demonstrates even more succinctly the total failure that was a near decade of governor Jennifer Granholm. The couple of items to note being stated this way:

"The facts as laid out in the SFA report are the complete opposite. An era of remarkable - almost certainly unprecedented - spending restraint. State spending from all state resource in FY2002 (the Engler Administration's last year) was $26.087 billion. In FY2011 (the last Granholm Administration budget) it was $26.050 billion. For the general fund (what everyone focuses on) it went from $9.189 billion to $8.280 billion. Nearly a billion dollar reduction. And for school aid from $11.220 billion to $10.776 billion."

In 2003, there was a roughly $12 Billion FEDERAL outlay for Michigan expenditures.  In fiscal year 2008-2009 it was about $22 Billion, and 2009-2010 (Granholm's last budget) it was $20 Billion.

This is not the effect of restraint, but rather the sellout of Michigan into a dependency on more federal support.

The image below the line is just the first salvo from both sides of the bridge issue.

Its good to see the arguments made from the different perspectives. Plenty to be said about whether or not we actually pay for it in one way or another, but surprisingly no one yet doing what will ultimately provide the most accurate answer.

The math equation.

20,000 Crossings a day now.  Unless the Ambassador bridge is FORCED to close, then the traffic would split.

Average ticket of $6 Gross $120,000/day (if the ambassador is FORCED to close) $44 Million a year

Debt service (interest only) of $30 Million a year. Then add to this the cost of operations, ongoing liabilities (you know those pesky benefits) and maintenance.   An additional $30? $50 million? A year?  

My goodness So who DOES pay for it when it doesnt even pay its bond?  mmmm?

Dick Morris says Rick Snyder should act like a Republican, and in the process draws out the hard core "re-distributionists."  Darrell Dawsey writes at MLive:

Matty Moroun is rich enough. He doesn't need or deserve a second bridge. (Personally, I wish someone could take the first one from him, too.) Free enterprise is fine, but private citizens shouldn't be in the business of owning international border crossings. Our borders, and the economic and national security issues they generate, are a matter of public interest.

Snyder's wishes of another bridge makes perfect sense in some ways, and little in others.

He is a "Milliken Republican" which brings a brand of centrism that has too much in common with the Dawsey think, that government ought to have control of all things no matter how miserably they fail under government control. Detroit Schools? Detroit itself?  Perfect examples of Centrism allowing a minor scratch to develop into full blown gangrene.  Why not invite such catastrophe when given the opportunity?  Perhaps a little brick and mortar money poured into the patient's [amputation inviting] open sore infested hole will fix it?

Maybe such things need to be questioned a little more thoroughly.

To hear MDOT talk, the proposed Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC) is not so much a bridge as a yellow brick road to eternal prosperity.  This image appeals to your Wizard, of course, but I am more concerned about whether the image is based in reality or merely the result of a bump on the head.  Why the DRIC instead of a private second span put up by the Ambassador Bridge (AB) people?

The case for DRIC goes something like this:  (1) we need a second bridge to accommodate the tremendous growth in traffic we will see in the future, (2) the good witch of the north (Canada, for those of you not following my Oz analogy) has offered us a $550 million loan to get started, and (3) we can turn that $550 million into another $2 billion from the federal government to put toward our roads.  Ultimately, the DRIC is supposed to generate thousands and thousands of jobs and enable our manufacturing and agriculture industries to thrive.  The Canadian loan, the cost of the project, and all future costs would be paid or repaid out of bridge tolls.

Let's set aside the "jobs" and "thriving industries" justifications for now.  Whether the bridge is built through a public-private partnership or by the AB folks, those benefits should still accrue, so those justifications favor neither approach.  And, if we need a second bridge, we need a second bridge, regardless of who builds it.

So, based solely on media coverage (a dicey proposition, I know), the case for DRIC appears to boil down to the fact that Canada has offered its loan for a public bridge, and we can use that loan to leverage federal highway funds.  Let's look at these issues in some more detail: