Gov. Jennifer Granholm has offered a rather odd proposal to involve four outside individuals as “mediators” in the process of her office negotiating a Fiscal Year 2009-2010 state budget with the Democratic House and Republican Senate in the face of a nearly $2 billion gap between desired spending and expected revenue.

Mirs News (subscription required) calls the move, “reminiscent of the Governor's Emergency Financial Advisory Panel (chaired by former Govs. William Milliken and Jim Blanchard), which she appointed in January 2007 to give direction on the state's budget crisis. . . Ultimately, few of the issues raised by the EFAP ever made it into the legislative debate.”

True, but the panel served it’s real purpose nevertheless, which was to give “bipartisan” cover to what the governor had decided as early as December, 2006, which was to go for a major tax increase. As the Mackinac Center’s David Littmann predicted at the time, and as was eventually proved by events.

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