This past weekend I had a fantastic opportunity.  I jumped in the minivan with my mom, my dad and my youngest brother Max and we set off on a fourteen hour trek across Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York and landed on the West Point of the Hudson and the United States Military Academy.

My brother is a freshman on campus, or, more accurately, he's a plebe at the academy and this was parent-plebe weekend.  

Now I won't lie, it was family time and I paid as little attention as possible to the sad state of Michigan's economy and failed leadership as humanly possible but there were times when I couldn't help but have my mind dragged back to my home state.

Over the course of the weekend the five of us made stops in towns and tourist traps all around West Point and some of what we saw was just plain jarring.  It was the same thing we'd seen in every town along the way in which we'd chosen to stop and fuel up the van.  Wanted signs.  Everywhere.  

In shops, in restaurants, at service stations, in the windows of office buildings and small-town manufacturers.  Everyone outside the state of Michigan is looking to fill jobs.  It hardly seemed fair.

We just can't stop shedding them, here.  And our biggest jobs producer, the domestic autos, still haven't wrapped up negotiations with the Big 3 as Ford takes it's turn on the "how-long-will-they-strike-this-time" express.

Going in to negotiations it was believed that Ford would present the most difficult challenge to the UAW because it's in the worst shape.  True to form, while GM and Chrylser talked VEBAs, Ford is talking lay-offs.

According to the Detroit News Ford is rumored to be offering bonus checks based on the automaker's performance to help sweeten the pot with the labor union.  But they're offering the checks at a price.

They still want the VEBA, they need to restructure the jobs-bank program and the kicker, the agreement will likely kill more Michigan jobs.

Ford also wants to make some provision for approximately 7,500 former Visteon Corp. workers that it agreed to take back as part of a 2005 bailout of its former parts subsidiary. That is likely to involve another round of voluntary buyouts for UAW members.

And the sad reality is, there are forty-nine other states out there who can offer these folks a job while the prospect of Michigan firms turning things around becomes bleaker and bleaker thanks to the Democrats massive $1.3 billion tax hike.  

The FREEP reports this morning that groups specializing in company turnarounds find themselves taking a whipping from the state as a party of the Democart $600+ million sales tax expansion.

These restructuring firms, which often must bill customers weekly to ensure payment, are frustrated that the new tax will apply to their services, saying it is the last thing their clients need.

"Many of the clients that we deal with have difficulty paying our bills as they are," said Patrick O'Keefe, founder of O'Keefe & Associates Consulting in Bloomfield Hills and president of the Turnaround Management Association's fast-growing Detroit chapter.

Struggling companies have no choice but to get expert help, turnaround firms say, and so somehow will have to cover the 6% tax on top of their restructuring costs.

I'd like to call these "unexpected consequences" but they aren't.  Andy Dillon and Jennifer Granholm knew exactly what they were doing when they refused to negotiate in good faith for cuts.  And moms and dads across the state continue to pay the price.  

It's often said that you can't tax your way to recovery.  That's doubly true when you're taxing the companies who help make recovery happen.

There really isn't any wonder why voters seem so fed up and ready to recall the lot of them.  But while voter anger over the Dems job-killing tax hikes (righteous anger, mind you) burns brighter and hotter by the day there are some in the state who believe these legislative blunders are symptoms of a broken system.

The Michigan Chamber of Commerce is putting forward a proposal to revise the state's term limit laws while making other changes in statute to ensure we never have a repeat of this past October deadline debacle.

The LSJ opines:

A person could serve a total of 12 years, all in one chamber or split in any way. Under current rules, a citizen can serve a maximum of six years in the House and eight years in the Senate.

The plan would require the Legislature to finish a budget on June 30 - months before the Oct. 1 start of Michigan's fiscal year. And, lawmakers would lose their pay for each day Michigan gets beyond June 30 without a balanced budget. Pay also would be taken from legislators who missed votes without an excuse.

From a practical standpoint, the idea of coupling some type of punishment for lawmakers to a term limits change makes sense. Voters are in the mood to exact their pound of legislative flesh.

But the best possible change is the simplest: Return to the wisdom of the Founders in relying on only one kind of term limit - elections.

Would a more experienced and entrenched legislature have "solved" the budget crisis any differently?  You'd have to assume that well established Democrats reveling in the power of incumbency would have only voted sooner to raise our taxes, so I'm not sure that change would have necessarily helped taxpayers all that much.

We can (and I'm sure we will) debate the merits of term limits until the cows come home (or jobs come back to Michigan).  They bring "fresh blood" into the system.  They bankrupt the knowledge base.  They prevent incumbents from oppressing the masses.  They make legislative progress impossible and that's a bad thing.  They make legislative progress impossible and that's a good thing.

There are arguments everywhere and a lot of them are compelling.

But what the LSJ is missing is the fact that voters are already well on their way to exacting that "pound of flesh" and they don't need a giant legislative package to do it.

And in the end, when the dust settles, there may be a few current Michigan legislators who'll need to pack up, jump into their own minivans and head out through Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.  There are jobs out there, Representatives, go find a different one.