Michigan may be looking at a billion-dollar budget surplus thanks in part to the resurgence of the Detroit-based big three automakers, the
Detroit News reported Wednesday.
According to the newspaper, the state government wrapped up its fiscal year with a budget surplus estimated at $800 million to more than $1 billion. Now the fight begins, the paper noted, over “how that extra money should be used” as lawmakers start the budgeting process later this month for the next fiscal year.
A spokesman for Gov. Rick Snyder, however, was quick to suggest that speculation at this point over what to do with the money is “a little premature.”
“The governor has been very clear,” the News quoted Snyder spokeswoman Sara Wurfel as telling the Associated Press. “He wants to make sure we don’t get into the same situation that we have been in time and time again.”
But plenty of other people are making their views known.
“Return it to the people that they took it from,” Leon Drolet, chairman of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance, told the News. “No one has suffered more over the last decade than taxpayers.”
Drolet suggested tax credits that would allow state residents to use it any way they like.
“Each person is the best judge of how to use their own money,” Drolet said. “Maybe it’s their kids’ education, maybe it’s fixes to a vehicle they’ve been putting off, or what have you. But I don't think there’s anything that the government could do with it that’s more valuable than what the citizens could do with it.”
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