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.

Rob Cleveland

When I talk to out-of-state relatives, they begin the conversation with the same pity-laden inquiry: “So how’s it going out there?” By “out there” they mean the state with the worst unemployment figures, rampant foreclosures, corrupt former mayors, headline-grabbing corporate meltdowns and enough clinical depression to put a squeeze on the country’s Zoloft supply.

Michigan’s slide into unwanted notoriety has been led by the collapse of the domestic automobile industry – once an engine for the economy, and now a drag both here at home and across the nation.

But unlike last winter (and spring, and summer), the news is looking a little brighter lately. Mind you, I’m not declaring “Mission Accomplished,” but the collective headlines that came out just this week could mean the auto industry, and by association the state of Michigan, could be on the mend.

Some Positive Signs at Ford, GM

The brightest news this week: Ford Motor Co., the only domestic manufacturer that opted not to take loans from the federal government, posted a near-$1 billion profit for the third quarter, built in part from a profit of $357 million from its North American operations. That is the first profit Ford has seen from its domestic unit since 2005.

Ford’s turnaround is tenuous, though. It still is sitting on a mountain of debt: more than $23 billion. That’s the equivalent of getting a job after a year of unemployment, and only now being able to face up to the maxed-out credit cards and home equity loans. And while Ford has some decent product out now, it is going to find it difficult to sustain a pipeline competing with other companies who shed their liabilities through bankruptcy, and now can devote more dollars to new cars and trucks.

It beats getting poked in the eye, though, and CEO Alan Mulally is predicting a return to annual profitability in 2011. Just one more year…

Meanwhile, east of Dearborn at the RenCen, the surviving General Motors crew is crawling to shore after the ship went down this summer. The public ire over billions of dollars in federal loans has apparently abated and they are buying GM cars again, up 4% versus October 2008 and up 13% over September 2009.

Perhaps more telling than sales, though, was GM’s decision to keep its European car unit, Opel, after a protracted effort to sell it to Magna – a giant Canadian parts supplier – and a consortium of Russian investors. The decision to keep Opel can only be based on optimism from the executive suites and a bullish forecast for the coming year.

In calling off the deal, GM managed to outrage both the German and Russian governments who had their own agendas and expectations built into the buyout. At least the taxpayers are getting some entertainment out of the federal loans, if nothing else just now.

What’s Up with Chrysler?

And then there is the plucky Chrysler that just won’t say die. In an all-out corporate marathon, Fiat/Chrysler-boss Sergio Marchionne took six long hours to outline the next, long five years that will pave the way to a Chrysler revival, largely on the backs of Fiat production platforms.

If the plan holds true, Fiat will do more for Chrysler in just two years, in terms of product sharing, than Daimler did for Chrysler during its entire ownership tenure. And Americans may, once again, be able to buy Fiats and Alfa Romeos at local Chrysler dealerships.

There are plenty of industry analysts and home-schooled amateurs who are writing Chrysler and Fiat off. Marchionne reminded the audience that the same dire predictions were made about Fiat before he took the helm there, and the company wound up turning a record profit in 2008.

Mind you, 2009 isn’t looking nearly as hot for Fiat but no one is lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills these days. If someone is going to try and revive the clinically dead Chrysler, it might as well be someone who has been through it all before.

The Road Ahead for Michigan

The slow and painful return of these three companies could mean better times ahead for Michigan. But that shouldn’t mean Michigan should give up its efforts to bring diversity to its business base. Foregoing efforts to bring other high-tech companies and industries into Michigan would mean that we’re back here a decade from now when the automobile industry takes another bad turn. And anyone who thinks the Big Three will ever have the same headcount it did five years ago is delusional.

Conservative groups are calling for elimination of tax breaks and subsidies to attract businesses here to Michigan. They claim it is a waste of time, and that those expenditures haven’t lived up to the forecasts for new jobs. That’s precisely the same short-term thinking that has put Michigan at the head of the pack when it comes to economic blight. Spending tax dollars to attract new businesses like high-tech software firms and new industries like the film business is a long-term investment: it won’t bring in jobs overnight but it beats the heck out of doing nothing and then whining about it when there are no results.

We can all hope and believe that the auto industry will come back. But Michigan needs to plan with the expectation that it might not. In the best-case scenario, more car jobs return to Michigan on top of jobs from other industries. Maybe then, the pity permeating over the telephone lines when out-of-state friends and family call may begin to dissipate.

About the author: Rob Cleveland is CEO of ICON Creative Technologies Group and a co-owner of Grange Kitchen and Bar in Ann Arbor.