LANSING �?? Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox offered a 92-point blueprint Tuesday on how he would improve Michigan should he win the 2010 governor’s race, saying he would cut the income and business taxes while also wrangling savings from government employee benefits.
Cox, who is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination amid a crowded field, said the income tax rate should be returned to 3.9 percent – where it stood before the 2007 change to raise it to 4.35 percent. He also called for cutting in half the revenue collected by the Michigan Business Tax, a savings he estimated would be as much as $1.3 billion.
“In essence, these ideas are really around a pro-growth, freedom idea,” he said. “The less we tax people, the more their creative energies are unleashed, that the more that businesswomen and men can keep in their pocket investing for their companies, the more jobs we create.”
The attorney general said he would seek enactment of these tax cuts in his first year.
Cox, discussing the plan with reporters, also called for reducing spending through greater state employee contributions to their health care, teacher pension changes and other benefit moves with government employees. He did not identify a specific program he would cut, but said the State Police and higher education would be top priorities for receiving taxpayer money. He said higher education spending, which has been cut this decade, should be restored to 2002 levels.
Cox also proposed eliminating the cap that limits universities to authorizing no more than 150 charter schools.
The proposals make Cox the first in the Republican field to offer a relatively detailed plan on how he would govern the state, a point he made sure to emphasize at the end of a 40-minute session with reporters.
“Feel free to ask everyone else where their plans and ideas are,” he said.
Sen. Tom George (R-Kalamazoo), one of Cox’s opponents, called the tax cut proposals a “great long-term goal that I share,” but “imprudent” at this time. George voted for the 2007 income tax increase.
“The state is facing a $2 billion shortfall in the budget,” he said. “It’s not realistic to think that we can give tax cuts at this time. The more important thing is to have a solvent government. … Steering the state toward insolvency in the name of tax cuts is a step in the wrong direction.”
Other reaction on the Republican side was quiet. The campaign of U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Holland) declined to comment, saying it had not yet seen the report. Messages left with the campaigns of Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and Rick Snyder were not immediately returned.
Cox said he decided to unveil his plan now – 11 months before the Republican primary – because the public is looking for leadership.
“A lot of this is leadership,” he said. “Some of these are new ideas, some of these are old ideas. Any good leader is willing to steal ideas from other people.”
On the spending side, Cox said implementing House Speaker Andy Dillon’s (D-Redford Twp.) plan to pool all government employees into one health insurance system, along with requiring state employees to contribute what the average of what other state government employees pay, would reap huge savings.
While Cox did not endorse a specific spending cut, he noted that several think tanks have proposed a variety of cuts totaling $2 billion.
“I won’t call them gold-plated, but the well-plated benefits that I and every state worker get don’t match up with what my neighbors get and what my friends, either working white collar or on the line at Ford, get. We have to adjust.”
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