Outside the Beltway: Michigan Teaches the Lessons of Tax and Spend Progressivism

Mike Brownfield /

While Time Magazine has set up shop in Detroit to chronicle the continuing decay of one of America’s great industrial cities, the Wall Street Journal has found a teachable moment 90 miles northwest in Michigan’s capital city: government cannot tax and spend its way out of deficits and joblessness.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Michigan’s 15.2% unemployment rate is the worst in the country, with the state having lost 750,000 jobs since 2000. Shockingly, since 2007, two families move out of Michigan for every one family that moves in. Oppressive taxation and out of control spending just might have something to do with it. From the WSJ: (more…)