Michigan

I'm a little surprised by the Michigan results. One is that Hillary won 55% of the vote. However, John Edward and Obama were not on the ballot. Basically running unopposed allowed Hillary to carry 55% of those who came out to vote, almost 40% voted for Uncommitted. Here is the scary thing for Hillary, she only carried 30% of the black vote. That means 70% of all black voters voted for someone other than Hillary. That makes South Carolina, with 50% of the electorate black, a scary place for her.

The interesting thing for Mitt Romney is his win in Michigan. 39% is not bad with McCain coming in second at 30%. This gives him 2 golds and 2 silvers. However I believe he is going to have a bit of bad luck in the next couple of races. I think he might get 3rd if he is lucky in South Carolina and then winner take all Florida does not look good for him.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/florida-primary.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/south_carolina-primary.html

The problem I have with Michigan is how Romney won it. Here is a good article about it:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2ZiNTg5MTViMzY2OTU4MzAxNTRhMDM2ODY5YTFlNDc=

Basically Romney pandered and promised to come in and fix all of Michigan's woes. Right now Michigan has been in recession for the last 6 years. They have lost jobs 6 of the last 6 years. Detroit, once a city of 1.8 million is about 900,000 today, once the city with the highest per capita income, it's now 63rd in the US. I believe that is largely due to a failure of it's state gov't to manage it's tax burden and spending programs. So what does Romney do, he offers them more gov't. I love how he promises to fix the problem with more of the problem. This is my problem with Mitt. He panders to whomever is listening and tries to become what he thinks we want him to be. We had that and his name was Bill Clinton. No thank you.

McCain might not have been wise but at least he was honest when he said there have been a lot of jobs lost there and they are probably not coming back. Of course this got a lot of air time and hurt his chances there just like when McCain opposed ethanol subsidies in farm centric Iowa. Later on he did begin offering federal Gov't solutions to there problems.

We really need to stop letting states make a mess of things and then looking to the federal gov't to bail out states. Michigan's problems are state related and the state needs to reduce it's tax burden on business and it's people and begin reducing the size of it's gov't if it wants to attract new business into the state and turn around it's jobless situation. No amount of Federal Gov't interaction is going to solve that problem.

Things like Enterprise zones can provide incentives for behavior that could be very good for Michigan, While we use them in my business, I don't support them because it is part of a completely out of control and way overly complex tax code that the Fed Gov't uses to try and control our behavior. I think that has to stop. I would personally like to see a single tax system that is collected in a simple way and is split between Federal, state and local levels. I would like to see a constitutional amendment that limits the percentage that an individual can be legally taxed. Then I would like to see all taxes eliminated that are not part of this simple system. This includes all sales tax, wine and beer tax, luxury taxes, smoking taxes, property taxes etc... By the way, it should be unconstitutional to add any deductions.