Posted on 05/08/2005 9:35:26 AM PDT by Dan from Michigan
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
They need to put a tax on the # of gallons air, each person breathes. THEN, they have to ADD in the amount of EXTRA air the politicians waste/blow out. Problem solved. At he POLITICIANS' expense.
LOCALLY SPEAKING: Detroit's mayor vs. Oakland Co.'s exec
For the past three years, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson have shared a cordial relationship.
But the cordiality turned to at least momentary hostility Wednesday when Kilpatrick appeared on the Frank Beckmann show on WJR-AM (760) and said that Patterson was an impediment to regional cooperation, especially on the issue of an expanded Cobo Hall.
Patterson responded on Beckmann's show Thursday with a tirade that had metro Detroit political activists talking all day.
Can't we all just get along?
The following is an edited transcript of the two interviews.
(snip only, but you will find the whole thing revealing)
"This is an election year, and when it comes down to it and he's falling behind in the polls, he'll start playing the race card. So he's not only going to bait the suburbs against the city. He's going to rally his troops and voters and say 'look at that honky county executive, he won't come to the table.'
"Don't try and tell me we haven't been a good neighbor. We tried to help Detroit. They can't get their act together. For him to say we're a non-player, that we won't come to the table, is wrong.
"Up until that interview. I thought Kwame and I had a working relationship. For him to blame his failures on Oakland County, that's it. I'm so damn angry over this [bleeped]. I'm not going to take it anymore."
http://news.maxisearch.net/20050325_0_11.html
What a guy, this mr kwame, LOL
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Kilpatrick's Cobo plans a pipe dream
Web-posted Jun 6, 2004
By PETE WALDMEIR
Special to The Daily Oakland Press
Let's see if I have this straight._ Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick thinks both Oakland and Macomb counties ought to continue to tax their visitors and tithe to the big city for the next half-century so he can spend up to $1.3 billion to replace or expand his city's aging and hardly venerable riverfront Cobo Hall and Convention Center.
As for Oakland County Exec L. Brooks Patterson's suggestion that a mysterious private interest "White Knight" might be enticed to take on that massive debt by incorporating it with another midtown casino, Kwame says no dice. The last thing Detroit needs is another casino.
Yet, "It must be a facility that in size, scope and beauty matches any convention center in Europe or Asia," big-thinker Kilpatrick intoned in a speech earlier this year.
Adding, of course, that "it must surpass anything in America," too.
In Detroit. Right.
This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. I hate to be the guy who breaks the news to the wunderkind mayor, but apparently none of his advisors will do it. That draft you feel, Mr. K, isn't the office air-conditioner. Could you have, ahem, left your trousers on the bedpost when you left home this morning?
Detroit's medical center is broke and three long-planned permanent casinos, each with a 400-room hotel, are tied up in legal wrangles and nowhere near delivery.
A $150 million renovation of the derelict Sheraton Cadillac is stalled, the Kilpatrick administration's grand plan for buying the old Michigan Central railroad depot and converting it into a new $130 million police headquarters is nowhere near reality, and even the nation's first strictly African-American museum has required a $500,000 bailout to keep from going belly up.
Regretfully, the city's youngest chief executive can't even seem to find a way to cash in on free money when it's offered. Encouraged by Kilpatrick's youthful enthusiasm, months ago Plymouth philanthropist Robert Thompson promised to give Detroit $200 million gratis to build 15 charter high schools in the city. When political crunch time came, however, Kwame bailed out and withdrew his support.
Hey, no "White Knight" from the suburbs should be allowed to come into Detroit and throw money around, right? Makes the pols look bad.
Undaunted, the generous Thompson then offered a gift of $10 million to help tear down abandoned buildings. All the Kilpatrick administration had to do was spend the money wisely. Detroit flunked again, demolishing fewer houses on a slower schedule than promised, and Thompson once more slipped his checkbook back into his pocket.
Talk about spinning gold into straw.
The latest Cobo scheme may be Kilpatrick's biggest pipe dream yet. As my sainted mother used to say, this 34-year-old's eyes certainly are bigger than his stomach. Here we have yet another case of a guy who grew up in a political family, accustomed to feeding on tax dollars, developing a filet mignon appetite on a grilled cheese sandwich budget.
The Cobo Hall convention and exhibition complex opened in 1960 and was expanded to 700,000 square feet in 1985. Bonds that were sold to pay for that long-ago expansion still are being paid for by a portion of taxes collected on liquor sales and hotel and motel rooms in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties. Those bonds don't expire until 2015.
So where to find fresh funding?
It's a time-honored bureaucrat trick to pile new debt on the old by extending existing taxes instead of trying to pass new ones. So Kilpatrick's grand plan for financing the new Cobo II is to raise the bulk of the $1.3 billion by tacking on an additional 30 years worth of bonds, extending Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties' indebtedness until 2045.
And get this: Presumably to spread the exposure more "fairly," Washtenaw, Monroe, Livingston and St. Clair counties also would be expected to join in the Cobo hotel-motel-liquor tax contributions.
There is a fat chance, of course, that any of this ever will come to pass. And an even fatter chance that Patterson's mystery investor will materialize.
You can be certain of one thing, however: It's not Robert Thompson.
Read Pete Waldmeir's column every Sunday in The Daily Oakland Press. Send e-mail to Pwaldmeir@aol.com. Call (586) 783-8648.
http://www.theoaklandpress.com/stories/060604/col_20040606049.shtml
Detroit is a town where the unemployed are unemployable. I'm speaking from experience, my plant on Detroit's East Side has literally spent millions to hire a staffing agency who did the recruiting, the testing, the interviewing and ultimately us for the hiring of weekend workers. Literally several thousand people went thru the process and of those who were hired, over half had to be replaced within a month.....It was an ongoing process for about 4 or five years until worked slowed down to the point that we didn't need the weekenders any longer.......
This story on the fast food tax is actually a couple of weeks old. I think the Detroit Free Press had it first, and the overall tone of the article was NOT in Kwame's best interests.
When news hit that Kilpatrick was found to be one of the US's worst mayors by Time Magazine, he whined and cried about not getting credit for good things he's done. Now that this story on his proposed fast food tax (which will hit more minorities than anybody) has gone national, I'm betting he'll make comments that the national media is picking on him for racist reasons.
I suspect a visit from Jesse Jackson very, very soon...
Look for this to spread far and wide and increase....States and Federal arent making anything on the cigarette tax anymore....!
Bump for later read!
"every dollar counts in a city already bracing for mass layoffs and service cuts."
What service cuts has he proposed?
"Maybe they could also tax the popcorn sold in all of Detroit's movie theaters?"
Are there any movie theatres still in Detroit? I thought they had all left the city!
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I plan to pull-up a chair, pop a cold one, and enjoy watching this Blue City cesspool of gangster black politicians and union thugs collapse during the next two years. (Detroit went 82 - 16 for Kerry last November).
"And yet for liberals, stimulating the economy by allowing people to keep more of their dollars so they can invest and save as they choose is ALWAYS an unthinkable option."
The problem is that there is nothing left in Detroit to invest in or to spend on. (well, maybe not nothing, but very little.) As a result, tax cuts wouldn't increase revenue.....
Me too! I really enjoy laughing at the "proud democrats" at my local watering hole! It's great fun to point out the success of their policies!
Nope. Detroit was worse. 94 - 5 Kerry. Most democrat big city in the country.
"after all the producers have vacated,"
Detroit is a good setting for the last chapters of "Atlas Shrugged"
Dr. King is spinning in his grave with centrifugal force...
http://drtucker.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/05/doesnt_this_guy.html
Dr. King is spinning in his grave with centrifugal force...
http://drtucker.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/05/doesnt_this_guy.html
The government will make the fast food outlets collect the taxes and turn them in to Big Brother. if they refuse, they get shut down. Plain and simple. And when businesses start getting shut down for refusing to collect taxes and turning in the revenue, the other businesses will not hesitate to cooperate.
I don't know how the retard would tax TV commercials. Ortiz would probably have adopted a TV licensing system (like the BBC's licensing system) where people who EVEN OWN televisions would have to pay $120 a year, with TV detector vand roaming all over New York state. He'd probably also do the same thing to video games (annual license/tax). Could you just picture a video game detector van roaming the streets looking for unlicensed Game Boys?
Sometimes when I think about it, I think when God was handing out brains, the liberals thought he said Hanes and went to the Heavenly Department Store's underwear aisle. :)
""We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." - Hillary Rodham Clinton June 2004"
More like the communist good.
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