{"id":1836,"date":"2014-02-11T06:48:30","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T11:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/?p=1836"},"modified":"2014-02-11T06:48:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T11:48:39","slug":"fantasy-creatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=1836","title":{"rendered":"Fantasy Creatures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/MLMG106.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1837\" alt=\"Fantasy Creatures\" src=\"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/MLMG106.jpg\" width=\"560\" height=\"415\" srcset=\"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/MLMG106.jpg 560w, http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/MLMG106-300x222.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 560px) 100vw, 560px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gdata.com\/?art=\/2014\/02\/MLMG106.jpg&amp;name=Fantasy Creatures...\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/buy.png\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Originally published in the <em>Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News<br \/>\n<\/em>February 9, 2014<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Okay, so yeah, I was taking a swipe at Governor Snyder in this one. The state of Michigan is in the odd position of running a surplus this year, and there has been much talk about what to do with it. One suggestion is to get rid of a tax Snyder championed on pension income. Snyder stated last week that this would be a bad idea because he thought the tax was fair and that not taxing pension income would be unfair to younger people. I mostly go along with that, but Snyder&#8217;s defense of young people seemed disingenuous when you look at his record of cutting education funding.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">But the bigger point is that there really is no such thing as a &#8220;fair&#8221; tax. I can go with &#8220;sensible&#8221; or &#8220;necessary&#8221; or &#8220;tolerable,&#8221; but trying to sell any tax as morally sound is only going to tick off the people who end up paying more and getting less benefit. I&#8217;m more inclined to pitch a tax as &#8220;Look, somebody has to pay for the stuff we share. Let&#8217;s think it through, do the best we can, and no whining.&#8221; But then I&#8217;m not a politician.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News February 9, 2014 Okay, so yeah, I was taking a swipe at Governor Snyder in this one. The state of Michigan is in the odd position of running a surplus this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlive-media-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1839,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions\/1839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}