Many Michigan residents will be paying higher taxes this year, thanks to tax hikes championed by Gov. Rick Snyder.

According to Daily Beast correspondent Howard Kurtz – a venerable Washington insider who is supposed to know such things – the greatest fear among certain Republicans in Congress is not that they might stumble during the current game of fiscal chicken and send the nation into default.

They are more worried, writes Kurtz, of being “targeted for defeat by anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist.” Which is what they dread will happen if they agree to anything that would provide the federal government with a single penny of additional revenue.

This leads me to wonder: Has anyone inside the Beltway taken a look at the tax increases Norquist signed off on here in Michigan?

Norquist, who has famously declared that his long-term goal is to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” runs an outfit called Americans for Tax Reform. Never at a loss for a sound bite, he has gained outsized media attention with a demand that candidates for state and federal office sign an anti-tax pledge. The state version calls on candidates (and incumbents) “to oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.”

The wrath of Grover, apparently, was not sufficient to intimidate Michigan Governor Rick Snyder or GOP majorities in the state House (63-47) and state Senate (26-12). They passed a budget this spring, ahead of schedule, and they balanced it the old-fashioned way: They raised our taxes.

State tax hikes will cost me and my family, I figure, about $1,500 a year. As a whole, individual Michigan taxpayers will pay $1.42 billion in new taxes, including a substantial bump in the Michigan income tax rate – which was supposed to fall to 3.9% over the next few years – to a higher, permanent level of 4.25%. There’s also a tax on a whole new category of income – pensions – which used to be exempt from state taxation.

Increased tax rates and new categories of taxation usually get ol’ Grover pretty red in the face, so I gave his office a call to see if he was planning to stage a recall campaign against Snyder, or to run primary candidates against offending legislators. Or maybe have some people shot at sunrise, which is the sort of thing he likes to say. (No wonder he gets on TV all the time.)

Apparently, Norquist was too busy torpedoing federal budget talks to spend any time with me. I was handed off to a press aide named John Kartch, who declined to return my calls or emails.

To be fair, if I were Kartch, flakking for a red-meat right-wing lobbying shop, I wouldn’t call me back either, given the type of people I usually hang around with.

To be even more fair, I didn’t need an interview with Kartch or Norquist to find out if they felt my pain last month, when the first installment on my higher state tax bill was due. (I’m self-employed, so I have the joy of writing checks to Uncle Sam and Uncle Rick four times a year, instead of just once.) Americans for Tax Reform issued a press release in April, when the Michigan House passed an early version of the tax hikes (different in degree, but not in kind, from the final measure.) Norquist didn’t attack the idea – he endorsed it.

Snyder, a former hi-tech executive who lives in Ann Arbor and ran for office as “one tough nerd,” is much more inclined to get tough on wage-earning Joes and Janes than with his former – and future – peers in the business community. While you and I are shouldering an additional $1.42 billion in tax hikes, Michigan businesses will get $1.64 billion in tax cuts. Some 95,000 businesses in Michigan will not have to pay any taxes at all.

Since the total tax increases you and I will pay are outweighed by lower taxes for businesses, state government winds up with less money – about $224 million a year less by 2013. That’s four tenths of one percent of the total state budget, which weighs in this year at $47 billion. I’m not sure this qualifies as drowning government “in the bathtub”; it sounds more to me like “throwing a little water up government’s nose.” But it was good enough for Grover. In his April 28 press statement, he ordained the Michigan tax package as a “net tax cut, it is consistent with the pledge.”

Even better, it will “help to end Michigan’s lost decade of high unemployment … lower the barrier for employers to start-up, expand and invest, inevitably creating more jobs across Michigan.”

We should check back in a few years to see how the “inevitably” thing is working out. I liked Republicans better back when, like Richard Nixon, they were all Keynesians. So I have a hard time figuring out how any jobs will be created when millions of families lose disposable income through higher taxes, just to provide tax breaks to a much smaller number of businesses. (If we were investing the added revenue in public infrastructure to enable private profits, like roads, schools and bridges, it would be a different story.) To whom are Michigan businesses going to sell their goods and services, when me and everybody else in the state has to fork over all our extra cash to Rick Snyder?

The pretzel logic asserting that my tax increase isn’t really an increase because somebody else is getting a bigger tax cut is easily exposed: If I tell the Michigan Department of Treasury I don’t intend to pay the $1,500 the new law says I owe because “Grover Norquist told me I was getting a net tax cut,” I’m pretty sure things won’t turn out very well for me.

Things won’t turn out very well for any of us if the entire country continues to be held hostage by a single Beltway operative with a big Rolodex and an oversized obsession about the size of his tax bill. Even right-wingers used to understand this, as the left-wingers over at TalkingPointsMemo.com have demonstrated, with graphs showing that both Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher addressed budget deficits by raising taxes while in office.

But you don’t have to go back to the 1970s or 1980s to find a conservative icon who supported a tax increase. You just have to go a little bit west, and pay us a visit here in flyover country. Rick Snyder raised taxes and not only lived to tell about it – he even got a pat on the back from America’s angriest anti-tax ayatollah.

Me? I couldn’t even get a return phone call. Thanks a lot, Grover.

Roger Kerson, creative director at RK Communications, is a media strategist for labor unions, environmental organizations, and green businesses.

Cheers! Here's to a bran new year!

After four months, the cramps, gas, bloating and diarrhea are fading away. During those long 16 weeks, from August to December, I was treated to what seemed like every antibiotic in the modern medicine cabinet, attempting to get an inflammation in my gut under control.

None of them worked.

I finally got better after modifying my diet, as instructed by a helpful physician’s assistant to one of the GI specialists I consulted. I had to go gluten-free for a couple of weeks, and also cut out a lot of gas-producing foods that you would normally think are rather healthy: beans, tofu, asparagus, broccoli and so on.

Now that I’m better, the sage doctors at the University of Michigan Health System are proposing – quite emphatically – to knock me unconscious, cut open my stomach, and forcibly remove a substantial piece of my large intestine.

If this sounds odd to you, imagine how I feel: I haven’t been able to eat right or shit right since summertime. Now that everything is more or less back to normal, I’m being instructed to head into the hospital for a controlled catastrophe, which will cause a lot more unpleasantness, at least in the short term. Not the least of which, as I found out at today’s pre-operative appointment, will be the insertion of tubes into several parts of my anatomy which – in my layperson’s opinion – are not suitable for said insertion.

[Idea for Obama: Write a regulation requiring doctors to say, “We’re putting a tube into your penis,” in place of the more clinical sounding, “We will be utilizing a catheter during this procedure.” Surely, thousands – if not millions – of men will go running from hospitals in terror, reducing surgical costs for half the population. Think of the savings!]

Blood and Guts

On top of the stomachaches, I’ve spent months worrying about whether I should say “yes” to surgery – or run away from the hospital in terror. Is the hoped-for elimination of symptoms – three chances out of four, according to the literature – worth the potential risks of the procedure? The risks include, for example, about one chance in 20 of a leaky colon, requiring further surgery.

The proximate cause of my distress is a condition called diverticulosis, a potentially nasty little condition that affects something like one-third of the U.S. population over the age of 45, and nearly half of those over the age of 60. [At 52, I’m a prime suspect.] Diverticula are little pockets that bulge out of the sides of your large intestine, creating small traps where food can get caught.

It’s kind of like having a tooth you can’t floss. But if you don’t floss and get a cavity, you can open your mouth for your dentist to get a filling. An infected intestine is a trickier proposition.

Luckily, most people with diverticulosis never get infected. If you’re middle-aged or beyond, there’s a decent chance you’ve got some side pockets in your colon that you don’t even know about. And really, I hope you never find out. Because if a bit of the semi-digested mush that is supposed to flow through your large intestine and out the business end of your ass takes a detour instead into one of your diverticula, then you’ve got diverticulitis. This is an inflammation that (a) hurts like hell, and (b) can cause real problems if you don’t get it under control.

By “real problems” I mean an abscess [I had one in March] or worse, a perforation – a hole in your colon. If any of the mush in your colon migrates through the hole, you are mixing yourself a shit-and-blood cocktail – and you don’t need an MD to know this is a really, really bad idea. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 20-30% of diverticulitis patients who get perforated go home in a box.

That’s one of the reasons surgery is recommended in cases like mine, after an inflammation that has subsided. It’s a prophylactic measure, intended to prevent the risk of an urgent procedure at some later date, because once you’ve had one inflammation, there’s a good chance you’ll have another. [I’m at two and counting, for those keeping score at home.] Surgeons prefer to operate on non-inflamed patients – for the sake of the patients, who are less likely to have bad outcomes.

Our Unevolved Intestines

Why is my own colon laying such an unwelcome trap for me? For one thing, I seem to have been born in the wrong place. Diverticular disease, the NIH reports:

… is common in developed or industrialized countries – particularly the United States, England, and Australia – where low-fiber diets are consumed. The disease is rare in Asia and Africa, where most people eat high-fiber diets.

A diet without enough fiber, the theory goes, makes your digestive system work extra hard. This causes a kind of hydraulic pressure that can weaken the walls of the colon, creating the dread diverticula.

It’s tempting to kick myself for not eating more raisin bran over the years.  But when I talked over my stomach problem with David Share, a friend and physician, he pointed out that personal taste is just one factor influencing our food choices — and probably not the most important.

“The amount of protein, the amount of fat, the lesser amount of vegetables all contribute to the rate of disease,” says Share, who oversees health care quality for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan, and serves as medical director of the Corner Health Center in Ypsilanti. “There’s a tendency to blame the victim: Why don’t you have more will power? Why don’t you make better choices? But cultural and environmental factors are very powerful; the foods you are presented with have a big influence on what you wind up eating.”

The Japanese, for example, eat much differently than we do – and not only do they have less incidence of diverticulitis, they are also less obese and less likely to experience diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and other so-called “diseases of civilization.” These conditions afflict citizens of Western countries because our guts – which evolved millions of years ago to process a plant-based diet – have not kept up with the more recent activities of our cerebral cortexes and opposable thumbs. In the past 10,000 years, we managed to invent agriculture, mechanize it, and create a food production system that is heavy on fat, refined sugar, and processed grains, but perilously light on fresh fruits, vegetables, and fiber.

Why do people eat better in Japan, a country every bit as wealthy and industrialized as the United States? It’s not because the Japanese are smarter, more in touch with their inner hominids, or read more manifestos by Michael Pollan. It’s because for various historical and cultural reasons, you can buy fish and rice on every street corner in Tokyo, while in Toledo or Tampa, you are much more likely to encounter burgers, pizza, and fried chicken.

Especially, Share points out, in low-income communities. “Why are poor people overweight?” he asks. “Because they can’t get any fresh food [at affordable prices], but there are plenty of Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger Kings.”

Detroit is one of the nation’s most notorious food deserts – a city of more than 900,000 people with without a single national grocery chain operating within its borders. There are, however, 73 fast food restaurants. Earlier this month, an outfit called the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine proposed a moratorium on new outlets of such establishments. The idea doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Among other things, it reeks of nanny-statism: Where do a bunch of DC-based doctors get off telling Detroiters what they can and cannot eat?

Yes, it’s a free country. But it’s hard to argue with physicians who feel their job description includes not only treating sick patients, but also wrestling with the broader environment that has an enormous impact on whether people get sick in the first place.

I sure wish some fiber-obsessed physician had read me the riot act 30 years ago, which might have helped avert my present predicament.

Speaking of which, in the course of writing this column, I’ve surfed through quite a few medical studies.  One that got my full attention, from the Mayo Clinic, suggests that the danger of a life-threatening diverticular perforation is extremely rare in a case like mine, after I’ve already survived one bout of the disease. Which leads me to wonder, again, if having my gut cut open is really and truly necessary. At the moment, I’m scheduled for surgery on Wednesday, Jan. 5. But as a fail-safe, I’ve made an appointment for a last-minute second opinion at a different hospital next Monday.

Wish me luck. And if you’d prefer to stay out of my shoes – who wouldn’t? – you might consider starting off the New Year with a bit of wheat bran dissolved in your champagne.

About the author: Roger Kerson is an Ann Arbor resident and media consultant at RK Communications.

The author's iPhone, clad in its new case: "I do have an iPhone, a wonderful gadget that can tell me what drug stores are near my house ..."

Happily, I was not sick enough to stay very long, so I was kicked to the curb on Saturday afternoon, clutching a prescription for oxycodone. [No, that’s not a typo – it’s the generic version of OxyContin.]

I need the stuff for my stomach pain, which – for reasons the UM docs could not quite explain – has lingered past any sign of inflammation that can be detected by a CT scan or in my bloodstream.

I asked the nurse who checked me out whether I could get the meds at any pharmacy, thinking that perhaps high-octane opiates are reserved for hospital dispensaries. “Well,” she said, “that’s why you have a prescription.”

Yes, but filling a prescription on a Saturday night is not so easy. There are no fewer than four stand-alone pharmacies within a mile radius of my house on the West Side – five if you count the one inside Kroger’s. I struck out at three of them.

First I tried the CVS on West Stadium, which a few years ago abandoned a perfectly serviceable store in the strip mall on West Liberty, across from the Ann Arbor Animal Hospital, for a larger space half a block away. Company bean counters must have justified the expense of this move with data showing they can sell more stuff in more square feet. But they don’t sell prescription meds at 5:55 p.m. on a Saturday night, because the pharmacists go home at 6, and five minutes isn’t enough time to fill a pill bottle and process the necessary paperwork.

There’s a brand new Walgreens on Jackson Avenue, just a few blocks away. Their business plan for capturing a slice of the west side medicine market does not, apparently, include offering more service hours than the competition: Walgreens pharmacists also go home at 6 p.m. on Saturdays. It’s the same story across the street at Rite Aid, in the north corner of the Westgate lot.

At this point, I was about ready to give up, with grudging admiration to the pharmacists’ guild for ensuring their members don’t have to work on Saturday nights. My sore – but not inflamed – stomach, I reasoned, could probably last until morning. But I was headed north anyway, so I made one last try at Village Pharmacy II, in the Maple Village mall across from the Veterans Memorial Park softball fields.

This shop – the only locally-owned business in the bunch – has pharmacists on duty until 9 p.m. I dropped off my prized painkiller script, and decided to celebrate with a bag of M&M’s on the way out. A friendly saleswoman directed my attention to a small display of homemade baked goods, explaining that proceeds benefit the Peace Neighborhood Center and Food Gatherers, two very fine local charities.

For a measly buck, I picked up two chocolate chip cookies and a brownie. I felt well satisfied for my one dollar investment, but it got better – a lot better. “Just a minute,” said the saleswoman. “I’ve got a gift bag for you.”

She asked if I had an iPhone, and iPod, or a Zune. I do have an iPhone, a wonderful gadget that can tell me what drug stores are near my house, update my stock portfolio, track the weather in Botswana and do all sorts of other tricks. But it is a lousy phone, dropping calls as if it were an outfielder on the 1963 Mets.

What’s worse, because I am a cheapskate, I have the 3G version – which set me back $99, much more than I’ve ever spent for a phone. Since the more expensive 4G version drops even more calls than the 3G – and was given a dreaded “not recommended” tag by Consumer Reports – Steve Jobs has grudgingly offered a free case to all of the non-cheapskates who shelled out $199 or $299 for the 4G. This is supposed to cut down on dropped calls.

But the Apple empire has not extended the same largesse to its less free-spending customers. Lucky for me, Village Pharmacy II has stepped into the void. In exchange for my $1 donation, I was handed a green reusable grocery bag stuffed with goodies, including:

• A nifty-looking red and black Belkin silicon sleeve for my iPhone [available online for prices ranging from $9.99 to $30.16, plus shipping];
• A free half-hour [or half-off one hour] hot tub soak at The Oasis [worth $20 or $25, depending on which day you go];
• A bottle of Absopure Spring Water, marked to commemorate the Sept. 4, 2010 re-dedication of Michigan Stadium;
• Three sample packets of Topricin [a homeopathic “pain relief and healing cream”];
• Two sticks of really awful-looking Gilliam Stick Candy [Cotton Candy and Strawberry flavors];
• A package of “Decorated Stationary” marked at $2.99 [but probably not a great seller because it mismatches “15 Decorative letters” with “10 Coordinating Envelopes”];
• Seven really bad greeting cards [“With Love Aunt and Uncle … Happy Anniversary!”] marked for sale at prices ranging from 50¢ to 75¢;
• A Village Pharmacy II/Dexter Pharmacy blue rubber bottle opener.

Quite a haul – not counting the bag itself, also worth at least 99¢. By the time I came back to pick up my pain meds, I was shamed enough to overcome my inner cheapskate and drop all my small bills – about eight bucks worth, I think – into the Peace Neighborhood Center/Food Gatherers donation jar.

I’m still way ahead on this transaction – and I haven’t even been to The Oasis yet.

My teen-aged daughter has been bugging me for a while to shop at Village Pharmacy II, instead of the nearby chain stores. This argument, it is safe to say, is now over. Also, my stomach is feeling better.

About the author: Roger Kerson is a media consultant at RK Communications. He serves on the board of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority.