After all, the congresscritters in Lansing sure didn't mind padding their asses with lifetime health benefits when turned out to the pasture with term limits.

Then they had the gall to bemoan term limits as driving up budget costs with all the newly retired 'public servants'.

So, you'd rather keep everyone else's taxes higher and exempt the tax deferred income (they aren't called "tax exempt income" by the way)?  yeah, i'd love no taxes on no one...but i also live in reality.

for each of the last four years, Lansing "solved" their $1B+ deficits with either a large tax increase (in 2007) or Federal bailout money.  every year - one time fillers, without touching the structural problems.  Now that the Republicans are in charge and acting like adults in Lansing, many of our so-called allies are parroting democrat talking points that reducing taxes on businesses (job providers) don't have a positive affect on us all.  Good conservatives will see and understand that an overall net $450M tax cut (as ATR acknowledged) plus filling a structural $1B+ annual budget deficit with all cuts is a good thing.  The Civil Service Commission makes getting significant concessions from the 50k state employees basically impossible.

And your solutions are...complain, keep business taxes unreasonable - oh yeah, and offer a solution that can't be done - get 11 Dems in the House to go along with the Republicans for FairTax...and even if we got them, it couldn't go on the ballot in time for the budget year.