Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Life in "Progress" State - Michigan edition

So what has contributed to Michigan's decline.

Maybe a coincidence (but I doubt it), but it appears that once the electorate there started voting exclusively democratic, the cesspool started brewing.........

My home state of Michigan provides something of an acid test for the popularity of the policies of the Obama Democrats. For a brief time, Michigan voted almost exactly the same as the nation as a whole: 59%-40% for Ronald Reagan in 1984, 54%-46% for George H. W. Bush in 1988, 44%-38% for Bill Clinton in 1992, with 19% for Ross Perot. Then Michigan began voting 3% more Democratic than the national average: 52%-38% for Clinton in 1996, 51%-46% for Al Gore in 2000, 51%-48% for John Kerry. In 2008 Michigan was 4% more Democratic than the national average: 57%-41% for Barack Obama. This was very similar to the state’s 2006 margins for Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm (56%-42%) and Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow (57%-41%).Standard political analysis would suggest that Michigan should have moved even farther toward the Democrats since 2008.

In the deep recession Michigan has consistently been the nation’s number one unemployment state. And the federal government under the Obama administration bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, two of Michigan’s largest employers—although one might more accurately say that the Obama administration bailed out the United Auto Workers, Michigan’s largest private sector union.

Leading the nation in unemployment?

Now that's "Progressive"!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Detroit has been listening to the siren song of the left for too long: that all social ills can be solved with wealth transfer. This is a democrat philosophy, a union philosophy, and it's an entitlement philosophy. Detroit is ground zero for these trends. But wealth transfer only marginally works and only when there is wealth to transfer. This fact is lost the genious libs in Detroit.

Social ills cannot be solved with wealth transfer, but they can be made worse that way. And worse for the recipient than for the extractant of said transfer. Detroit proves this.

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of one of the left's most hated industries: strip mining. It's not okay to strip mine a coal seam in the Earth, but cities? Fair game.