LANSING, MI, December 9, 2020 –Michigan Freedom Fund Executive Director Tony Daunt today encouraged lawmakers to reject Senate Bill 492, an extension and expansion of failed corporate handouts that would put Michigan taxpayers on the hook for another $300 million in giveaways to well-connected big corporations while small businesses and those who work at them struggle to keep the doors open or put food on the table.
The handout for big business was introduced last summer and stalled in the Senate. The Freedom Fund has learned there are efforts under way by some in the Senate to move the disastrous legislation as early as today, adding insult and huge new expense to the injury done to Michigan workers by Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s unscientific lockdown orders.
“Senate Bill 492 is an outrageous and unacceptable slap in the face to countless small business employees, entrepreneurs, and taxpayers who have seen their livelihoods crushed by their state government’s disastrous response to a global pandemic,” said Daunt. “Lansing’s answer to COVID-19 thus far has been a tragic combination of incompetence, heavy-handed overreaction, and a pathetic inability to work together. Now some in the state Senate want to charge taxpayers an extra $300 million for the priviliege, and to hand their cash to big businesses that haven’t earned it.
“The Michigan Freedom Fund strongly urges lawmakers to resist this tone deaf and expensive handout to the state’s largest and most politically well-connected while hundreds of thousands of their fellow Michiganians are relegated to begging the Governor to let them do anything as simple as work a job or earn a paycheck.”
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