Detroit Free Press: Yes To Obama $400 Billion Tax Hike, No To MI Business Property Tax Break

In college I was dating this girl once for a couple weeks. We saw each other every day, became romantically involved, yada, yada. But then I cooked her dinner one evening, and she totally freaked out, said it was "too soon" and our dating stopped there and then. I was like 'what the heck?' Apparently, my kind of ex got a job at The Detroit Free Press: Editorial: It's too soon for another big tax change in Michigan. The freep insists that what they admit is a bad, job-killing tax be kept for the collective good:

...Admittedly, the personal property tax -- the additional millage that most businesses pay on their equipment, on top of what they pay for land and buildings -- is difficult to administer. It is also an obstacle when Michigan competes for new firms with states that have dropped or changed similar taxes.

By why let that stand in the way on the road to their collectivist Utopia?

The personal property tax also helps sustain day-to-day operations of local governments, community colleges, counties and intermediate school districts. Its impact, however, is erratic. In Wayne County, the Village of Grosse Pointe Shores gets just 0.5% of its property taxes from the personal property tax. In River Rouge, by comparison, it's 56.8%.

Gross Pointe Shores, by the way, is bailing on Wayne County to become part of Macomb County to... pay fewer in taxes! You can't tax your way to prosperity you know. Quite the opposite. The freep's insistence that the admittedly bad tax helps "sustain day-to-day operations of local governments, community colleges, counties and intermediate school districts," is disingenuous because hiding behind that statement are unsustainable union benefits like free healthcare that lets employees retire in their late 40s on full dinosaur pensions that we can no longer afford. The freepkind of alude to that later in the piece:

Lawmakers have talked about replacing some of this money, but not all. Indeed, some apparently view this as a backdoor way to force more local efficiency and consolidation.

But this is the wrong way to do that.

And of course, in the freep's opinion:

 ...Business is getting enough of a tax break. Let's see how that works, and how many jobs it creates, before making further changes.

So surely the Detroit Free Press is also against Obama leveling a $400 billion tax increase via Stimulus II, right? I mean, it's so soon! So sudden. So big of a change without the first one proving it did a darned thing at all. Well the freep did come out for it (Detroit local MSM come out swinging for more Obama spending where the freep editorial was titled "Congressional inaction not an option"), and don't call me Shirley.

Leslie Nielson made more sense in character that the Detroit Free Press editorial board does in their jobs

UPDATE: Via Instapundit:

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I was tentatively in favor of the jobs plan that Obama proposed last week. But that’s before I realized that he has no intention of trying to get it passed. . . . I really wish that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.”

And here people thought that Obama would want to raise $1 billion to get re-elected. The pundits were off by some $450 billion. All that money and corresponding tax increases to save one single job which is filled right now by a person doing it as badly as possible. And the freep likes it...