The GOP’s reign of gubernatorial terror: Here are the small-government zealots who made their states considerably worse
"The next time some idiot wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt and a sneer tells you that we need leaders who will run the government more like a business, kindly direct their attention to Snyder. A business executive and CPA with no prior experience serving in government, Snyder was elected in the wave election of 2010 that swept Tea Party conservatives into office at the state and federal level. He immediately set about trying to run the state like it was a division of Gateway, the computer company where he was an executive during the 1990s. He crushed unions and made Michigan a right-to-work state, cutting services, and replacing the business tax with a flat tax while eliminating tax breaks on pensions, thus putting more of the state’s tax burden on the poor and working classes. The result? Michigan now ranks a whopping 36th in per capita income and just spent a year and a half poisoning 100,000 people with water so polluted, a local General Motors engine plant stopped using it because it corroded the factory’s machinery. Snyder is not the only Republican governor swept into power during the Tea Party wave of 2009-10 who used his state as a lab experiment for the type of conservative governance the GOP has been pushing for decades – lower regulations, lower taxes, slashing government services, and generally screwing over everyone not in their socio-economic class through austerity budgets and a boneheaded, stubborn refusal to adjust their policies in reaction to changing events. How is that working out for some of the other governors? You’re probably already well acquainted with the disasters of the Scott Walker and Chris Christie administrations. But let’s review some of the others."
