Today, and for the foreseeable future, Michigan business tax policy is finally "more conducive to job creation and investment" than it has been at any time in at least a decade.

Instead of spending cuts, the plan increases the tax bite on personal income taxpayers, which could have unfortunate unintended consequences. This happened because the preferred offset for a substantial business tax cut -- serious spending cuts -- would have prohibited the governor from fixing a wretched business tax climate until he could also overcome the cowardly behavior of the state's political class when confronted by the screeching generated by a public school political machine. Snyder got just about everything he asked for on the business tax reform because he chose to avoid a major war with the Big Education spending interests.

To understand how unrealistic a strategy of offsetting business tax cuts entirely with spending cuts might have been, consider a request that was often made of Mackinac Center staff during this dispute over the killing and replacing of the MBT. Loosely paraphrased and with a bit of sarcasm, this request boiled down to lawmakers requesting the following: "Please tell us where the magic pile of $1 billion in needless spending is located so that we can cut something politically harmless and not get in trouble for taxing retirement income."

One lawmaker reportedly went so far as to say that the Mackinac Center wasn't providing enough information on alternative cuts to the politicians. And he's right ... but only assuming that you want to ignore literally dozens upon dozens of reports and articles since the first of this year from this news website detailing the billions of dollars in outsized costs for employee pay and benefits within Michigan's K-12 public education establishment.