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Topic: Truth squad- Snyder as a FOUL
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

press release › Progress Michigan Files Hatch Act Complaint Against Gov. Rick Snyder



October 28, 2014
Progress Michigan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

News from Progress Michigan

October 28, 2014

Contact: Sam Inglot, 616-916-0574, sam@progressmichigan.org

Progress Michigan Files Hatch Act Complaint Against Gov. Rick Snyder

Complaint centers around controversial fundraiser and no-bid contracts

LANSING — Today, Progress Michigan filed a complaint with United States Office of Special Counsel alleging that Gov. Rick Snyder violated the Hatch Act. The complaint alleges that Gov. Snyder improperly used his official authority and influence to award millions of dollars in no-bid Medicaid contracts to a business whose owners and executives had contributed to his reelection, including hosting a lavish fundraiser for the governor.

“Gov. Snyder has passed the buck on numerous scandals surrounding his administration, this time, however, Gov. Snyder has directly benefitted from and is responsible for this alleged violation of federal law,” said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan. “The Hatch Act is designed to protect taxpayers from politicians who abuse their power to help out their political allies and donors and that’s exactly what Gov. Snyder has done.”

At question in the complaint are a ritzy fundraiser for Gov. Snyder held by the owners of J&B Medical Supply and millions of dollars in no-bid contracts awarded to the same company, including a contract the day after the fundraiser. The fundraiser earned Snyder $54,000 toward his reelection campaign.

The complaint alleges that Gov. Snyder “violated the Hatch Act by using his official authority and influence to affect the result of his own reelection campaign by awarding no-bid contracts to a vendor of Michigan’s federally-fueled Medicaid program, the owners of which have contributed to his reelection campaign.”

“Gov. Snyder needs to be held accountable for consistently putting the well-being of his corporate pals and wealthy campaign donors over the interests of hardworking Michiganders,” Scott continued. “With the corruption and self-dealing in the Snyder administration if Richard Snyder has a second term, it will look like Richard Nixon’s and Michigan deserves better.”

Hatch Act Complaint – Progress Michigan
Post Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:35 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Progress Michigan and Eclectablog shared a link.












BREAKING: Snyder administration officials illegally destroyed documents sought in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request


Progress Michigan has been doing yeomans work...


www.eclectablog.com
..
Post Fri Oct 31, 2014 7:28 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

BREAKING: Snyder administration officials illegally destroyed documents sought in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request

By Eclectablog on October 30, 2014 in GOPocrisy, Lies, Michigan Republicans, Rick Snyder

Progress Michigan has been doing yeomans work holding the Snyder administration accountable for corrupt actitivies, shining the sanitizing sunshine needed to ensure that transparency isn’t just a catch phrase used by our Governor. In response to an August request for documents from the Michigan Department of Community Health, Progress Michigan was told in September that no such documents existed. Then, this week, they were told that the documents HAD existed but that they were destroyed when MDCH Director Jim Haveman retired.

However, the request was submitted on August 21st. Mr. Haveman retired after a mild stroke a full week later on August 28th. In addition, the destruction of the documents was illegal.

Here’s what Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan had to say about the matter:


Clearly this administration believes that they are above the law and accountability to the public. Gov. Rick Snyder has promised time and again that he would run an honest and open government. It’s time for Gov. Snyder to show leadership, order the departments to release all documents and allow Michigan citizens to see how his administration truly operates.

The public has a right to this information and these blatantly political stall tactics will not be tolerated. Our attorney has drafted a letter informing the Michigan State Police of the alleged illegal action of the Department of Community Health. We will not stop fighting until the public is granted their right to an open and honest government.

Progress Michigan has sent a letter to Directors of the MDCH and the Michigan Department of Technology, Management, and Budget demanding answers as to how they will recitify the situation and keep it from happening again. You can read that letter HERE.

This is third recent incident of Snyder administration officials blatantly disregarding the law governing FOIA requests, according to Progress Michigan:
•The Department of Corrections told Progress Michigan Wednesday that a recent FOIA request would not be completed until late next week. However, the department has previously communicated to Progress Michigan that most of the documents were ready for release. Today, Progress Michigan staff has asked for the completed documents and have now been told by a FOIA coordinator that he is unable to release the documents without “running it up the flagpole.”
•The Department of Human Services informed Progress Michigan staff that documents were ready for delivery on Wednesday upon full payment. However, after receiving full payment, the department reversed course and would not release documents until the communications office had reviewed them. When asked why the department changed course, Progress Michigan was told that it was due to the fact that the FOIA involved Director Maura Corrigan and the communications office needed to review them before releasing the documents.

Gov. Rick Snyder has created a culture of corruption and secretive governance where state agencies are run in a clandestine fashion, answerable only to their superiors and without regard for the transparency that our laws require. The hypocrisy of this, given Gov. Snyder’s white paper titled “Create a Culture of Ethics in Michigan’s Government”, released during his campaign in 2009, is stunning.

It’s also disgusting.
Post Fri Oct 31, 2014 7:33 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Michigan Governor to Cut Taxes for Corporations While Cutting Services for the Poor and Middle Class


It looks like Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan whose legislation will give “Emergency Managers” carte blanche over Michigan municipalities in the event of a ‘financial crisis’ is lowering taxes on businesses by raising taxes on the poor and working class: Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI) has…


forbes.com|By Erik Kain
..
Post Sat Nov 01, 2014 10:26 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Erik KainErik Kain Contributor
I write about video games: the industry and the culture.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.


Education 3/15/2011 @ 4:42PM 6,488 views

Michigan Governor to Cut Taxes for Corporations While Cutting Services for the Poor and Middle Class


It looks like Rick Snyder, the Republican governor of Michigan whose legislation will give “Emergency Managers” carte blanche over Michigan municipalities in the event of a ‘financial crisis’ is lowering taxes on businesses by raising taxes on the poor and working class:


“Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI) has proposed ending his state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cutting a $600 per child tax credit, and reducing credits for seniors, while also cutting funding for school districts by eight to ten percent. At the same time, as the Michigan League for Human Services found, the state’s business taxes would be reduced by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent, under Snyder’s plan.

Snyder wants to cut business taxes by 86 percent, lowering revenue from those taxes from $2.1 billion to approximately $293 million – a drop of $1.8 billion, all during a recession that has Michigan, like so many other states, strapped for cash. To close that gap, personal income taxes would go up from $5.75 billion to $7.5 billion – and rates on the lowest earners would go up more than rates on the top 1%:

mitaxchart0314

As Pat Garofolo notes, if you are a Michigan resident in the lowest income bracket (bottom 20%) you pay a tax rate of 8.9 percent. If you are in the top one percent, you pay a rate of 5.3 percent. This is a dramatically regressive tax system.

So let’s sum up the state of affairs in Michigan under governor Snyder:




If you are a Michigan resident you can vote for whoever you like to run your town or city – this is a democracy after all (at least for the moment, we will make references to democracy in the present tense).

But after Snyder’s dramatic cuts in support for local governments and schools, you may find that you don’t have the funds to run your city or school district effectively. This may trigger the governor’s office which could declare your city in a state of financial crisis. At this point, governor Snyder could, theoretically, appoint the CEO of General Motors or any other qualified private citizen to come into your town and take over everything from the public services, to the distribution of state and federal tax dollars. Meanwhile, this Emergency Manager is likely to come from the upper income bracket, and therefore pay a lower rate of income tax than you are. If he owns or works for a corporation – and I’d say this is very likely – Snyder’s tax code will benefit him even more.

I can only echo the words of Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings: this is not conservatism. “This is nothing short of giving a governor the power to appoint local viceroys who rule by decree.” And yet, there is no Tea Party protesting at the steps of the Michigan capitol in Lansing, no angry Fox pundits decrying the big government policies of the GOP in Michigan.

Exit question: under Snyder’s legislation, is it at all likely that a cottage industry of Municipal Management Consultancies will rise up to offer their services for struggling local governments? This strikes me as a potentially very lucrative business, made all the more so by the fact that Emergency Managers will be exempt from any lawsuits brought against them. Quite quickly, this industry could become an influential lobbying interest in Lansing, entrenching their very secure rents even further. Meanwhile, democracy erodes with each new, manufactured crisis.

Fortunately, Michigan voters will have a chance to kick Snyder and the GOP out of office in a few years. Unfortunately, the Democrats in that state are only arguably the lesser of two evils.
Post Sat Nov 01, 2014 10:29 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Michigan taxes: Businesses pay less, you pay more


Stephen Henderson and Kristi Tanner, Detroit Free Press Staff Writers 11:59 p.m. EDT October 4, 2014


People pay more.

Businesses pay less.

And the jobs picture is still clouded by slow growth and unemployment.

Four years into Gov. Rick Snyder's first term in office, that's the net effect of the signature tax reforms he pushed through the Legislature in 2011.

Snyder's plans relied heavily on the premise that lower taxes for businesses would create a stellar turnaround, ending the depression that gripped the state when he took office. And many of his changes made good policy sense.

But a close analysis of tax incomes shows that the cost of funding state government has shifted to those who can least afford it, and the job growth that would have justified that shift hasn't materialized.

That's a hard sell for a governor seeking re-election in a competitive race with a challenger who vows to reverse some of Snyder's most significant changes.

And with just a month before the election, Snyder has neither acknowledged the deficiencies of his tax policy, nor indicated that he's open to changing course.

How you're paying more

For some Michigan families, changes to tax credits and deductions have been deeply felt.

The state is collecting nearly $900 million a year more from individuals, many of them poor people who have lost tax credits or deductions.

Meanwhile, businesses pay about $1.7 billion less in taxes, all while job growth has slowed each year since the tax cuts took effect.

Michigan's individual income tax revenue jumped 25% between 2011 and 2012, a $1.4-billion increase. About $560 million of that is because of income growth, and much of that is because of a one-time spike in national income tied to changes in the federal tax code.

The remainder of the increase can be explained by deductions and tax credits that were either eliminated or modified significantly. For millions of Michigan residents, these were experienced as tax increases.

They include:

■ $270 million from a decrease in the homestead property tax credit.

■ $240 million from cuts to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

■ $200 million from the pension tax changes.

■ $50 million from the elimination of deductions for children.

■ $50 million from the elimination of the special exemption for age and unemployment compensation.

■ $90 million from elimination of other nonrefundable credits, such as city income tax, homeless/food bank contributions and contributions to public universities and public broadcasting.

The average taxpayer received half as much in credits in 2012 as in 2011. In addition, the new tax code freezes the individual income tax rate at 4.25%; before the changes, that rate was scheduled to drop 0.1 percentage point each year until it reached 3.9% in 2015.

In fact, Michigan had the fifth largest percentage increase in tax revenue collected from individuals, according to a survey of government tax collections by the U.S. Census Bureau during fiscal year 2013.

"By taking away taxes on business, you are increasing the burden on everything on else," said Norton Francis, a senior research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "The money has to come from somewhere."

Shifting tax burden toward individuals tends to hit the low-income population the hardest, Francis said: "High-income individuals tend to save more, those receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit pour that money right back into the economy and tend to spend locally."

Michigan taxpayers claiming the EITC and seniors able to claim property tax credits experienced some of the largest tax increases. About 793,000 tax returns qualified for the Michigan EITC in 2011; the average return was $450. In 2012, the average EITC credit dropped to $140 among 772,000 returns filed by Michigan residents. Senior citizens averaged about $740 in property tax credits in 2011, down to $590 in 2012.

The revamping of Michigan's tax code — described as some of the most sweeping tax reforms the state has seen since the mid-1990s, "involved a fairly significant tax burden shift; reducing business taxes and increasing individual taxes," according to a report by the Citizens Research Council, a nonpartisan research group.

It's a different story for businesses.

Revenue from business taxes fell by about $1.7 billion after the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax (MBT), replaced in 2012 by a 6% flat corporate income tax. About 95,000 businesses no longer pay state taxes. In addition, the repeal of the business personal property tax passed this year by the Legislature is estimated to reduce state revenue from business by $350 million in fiscal year 2017.

Where are the jobs?

While businesses have paid less in taxes, job growth is slowing. It's an astonishing outcome for a tax policy whose sole purpose was to put Michiganders back to work.

In 2009, at the end of the great recession, Michigan unemployment spiked at 14.2%, largely because of massive automotive and manufacturing job losses. Nationally, unemployment stood at 9.6%. Yet despite the overall decline, jobs began returning to Michigan in 2010, the last year of then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm's administration, as the auto industry improved. While the unemployment rate was 11%, Michigan added about 76,000 payroll jobs — more jobs than in any year since Snyder's tax cuts took effect, but still a fraction compared to the nearly 800,000 jobs lost over that decade.

At the end of Snyder's first year in office, Michigan added 97,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was 9%, a percentage point above the national rate of 8%. But in 2012, the first year of Snyder's business tax cuts, hiring grew by only 75,000 jobs. Between 2013 and 2014, just 32,000 jobs were added.

"It's fair to say that job growth has been slower in Michigan after the tax shift went into effect than the first year of Gov. Snyder's administration," said Charles Ballard, an economics professor at Michigan State University. "It doesn't mean that his policy wasn't successful, so much is determined by forces beyond control of the governor."

Ways to help the people

Taken individually, many of the changes that Snyder pushed made sense, say policy watchers and economists who saw the old tax code as antiquated and complicated.

The Michigan Business Tax, for instance, was almost universally loathed, and considered a disincentive for companies to locate or operate in the state.

"MBT was a labyrinthine business tax," said Ballard, "such a godawful mess — it was a mighty bad tax."

The hope, falsely placed or not, was that a simpler business tax that produced a reduction for thousands of businesses would jump-start hiring.

Snyder's pension tax was even described by the Free Press editorial page as a move toward fairness: Retirees with 401(k) accounts paid income taxes, so it didn't make sense to treat pensioners differently.

Other changes were simply part of the governor's fiscal philosophy, such as his overall dislike of tax credits, which he has described as built-in budget liabilities. His effort to balance a state budget that was routinely at least a billion dollars out of whack relied heavily on removing those kinds of liabilities up front.

But viewed in totality, Snyder's tax code revisions have placed a much heavier burden on individuals, and haven't resulted in sufficient job growth to bring Michigan in line with national unemployment numbers. In Michigan, the August unemployment rate was 7.4%, compared to the national rate of 6.1% in the same month.

In addition, the governor has balked at enacting other sensible tax changes that could help turn the jobs tide.

There has been no talk, for instance, of tying the new tax breaks for businesses to job creation, or of tax penalties for companies that eliminate jobs in Michigan or move them elsewhere.

Nor has Snyder discussed ideas such as a progressive individual income tax, which would require a constitutional change. Under many models, that would lower rates for the vast majority of low- and middle-income taxpayers, while raising rates for top earners to those similar in other states.

And Michigan is an outlier there: In 2012, only six other states had flat income taxes, while 34 had graduated tax rates.

Policy wonks can argue about business versus individual taxes, how to grow jobs, and how to keep more money in families' pockets. But analysis of results — and data — matter.

Credit where it's due

Most people, Ballard says, think of a business tax as "a tax on fat cats." But that's not entirely true, the Tax Policy Center's research shows: On average, taxes levied on business income are funded roughly 80% by shareholders, but about 20% by workers, in the form of lower wages.

But economists like Ballard and Francis say cuts to business taxes are unlikely to produce real employment changes.

For most businesses, the economy, not tax policy, guides investment, Francis said: "The literature suggests tax policy may make a marginal difference, but companies tend to make location decisions based on labor force, market and infrastructure."

Snyder is an accountant, a data guy whose entire leadership pitch hinges on Michigan's financial recovery. Four years into his term, there's no question that Michigan's economy has improved — along with the nation's.

Can Snyder take credit? That's the question voters should be asking.

Michigan's changing business tax structure (numbers for fiscal year 2013, in millions)

Below are revenue estimates for the impact of changes to Michigan business taxes for fiscal year 2013.




Prior Law: Michigan Business Tax Revenue

$2,099.80



Business Tax changes:


Repeal Michigan Business Tax (Dec. 31, 2011)

-$2,152.4


Corporate Income Tax (Jan. 1, 2012)

$876.1


Financial Institutions Tax

$43.9


Certified Credits/Options Tax

-$437.4


Total changes to business tax

-$1,669.8


Net business tax revenue after credits

$430


Source: Senate Fiscal Agency, State Budget Overview, August 2014

Breakdown of Michigan's $1.4-billion individual income tax increase, 2012 tax year (in millions)




Income growth and other tax base changes

$560


Decrease in homestead property tax credit

$270


Cuts to the Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit

$240


Pension tax changes

$200


Elimination of child deduction

$50


Elimination special exemption for age and unemployment compensation

$50


Elimination of other nonrefundable credits

$90


Increase in personal exemption

-$20


Decrease in tax rate from 4.35% to 4.33%

-$40


Total

$1,400


Source: Michigan Department of Treasury
Post Sat Nov 01, 2014 10:33 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

But viewed in totality, Snyder's tax code revisions have placed a much heavier burden on individuals, and haven't resulted in sufficient job growth to bring Michigan in line with national unemployment numbers. In Michigan, the August unemployment rate was 7.4%, compared to the national rate of 6.1% in the same month.

In addition, the governor has balked at enacting other sensible tax changes that could help turn the jobs tide.
Post Sat Nov 01, 2014 10:37 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

How you're paying more

For some Michigan families, changes to tax credits and deductions have been deeply felt.

The state is collecting nearly $900 million a year more from individuals, many of them poor people who have lost tax credits or deductions.

Meanwhile, businesses pay about $1.7 billion less in taxes, all while job growth has slowed each year since the tax cuts took effect.

Michigan's individual income tax revenue jumped 25% between 2011 and 2012, a $1.4-billion increase. About $560 million of that is because of income growth, and much of that is because of a one-time spike in national income tied to changes in the federal tax code.
Post Sat Nov 01, 2014 10:39 pm 
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