With opinion leaders* in our state thinking like this, it is no wonder Michigan is in the shape it is. Via MLive:

Take her proposal for extending the sales tax on services, something just about every economist not on the payroll of one of the countless right-wing think tanks thinks is a good idea. Our economy is service-based, so it makes sense for the tax code to catch up.

Back in February, the guv popped a modest plan to drop the sales tax rate to 5.5 percent and extend it to some services in exchange for phasing out the hated Michigan Business Tax surcharge. It would have raised an extra $400 million or so this year and been revenue-neutral in a few years.

I’m going out on a limb, but I’m reasonably sure the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is not on the payroll of the Heritage Foundation and the IMF has found that for every $1.00 of  ‘stimulus’  spending by a government will only produce $0.70 of economic activity (i.e. GDP). Furthermore, economists have know for a long time that tax cuts increase tax cuts and in a recent study economists have calculated that for every every dollar of corporate tax cuts, $2.76 of new GDP is created.

If Granholm would’ve cut taxes (even modestly) for all business in Michigan several years ago rather providing ‘green energy’ project grants (stimulus spending), our economy would be in much better shape today.

The balance of this article is really bizarre as one of Michigan’s opinion leaders* bounces randomly from bashing Granholm for not raising taxes to bashing Sarah Palin for no real reason.

The most likely landing place for Granholm is cable TV. MSNBC would be a logical ideological match, but CNN’s cringe-worthy “Odd Couple” paring of conservative columnist Kathleen Parker and hooker-befriending Eliot Spitzer is sure to fail, so there could be an opening there.

I’d personally like to see Granholm kick Sarah Palin’s “mama grizzly” butt in a new version of “Crossfire,” but the half-term Alaska governor is at least smart enough not to go toe-to-toe with a Harvard-trained attorney who bested Joe Biden in VP debate prep.

While its amazing that Liberals can’t get Sarah Palin out of their minds for a second, the more astounding point is that Michigan’s economy is a disaster due to its high tax rates and a general lack of competitiveness and Michigan’s opinion leaders* are calling for more of the same.

*I realize that the author of the MLive article, Susan J. Demas, is not exactly a household name but she mirrors the thinking of many liberal “opinion leaders.”