By: Jade - from the series of guest posts written by Dr. Baldwin's students at Michigan State University.

Numerous blogs on this site are about women and their rights, but I was thinking about something a little different. Many people don’t realize what really goes on behind closed doors in the senate because it’s mostly ideas that they don’t want the people to know about. This is not something most men and women want to even talk about for the fear of being shunned by society. Why is it that our state and house representatives can serve one term and work part-time, but get paid for full time work? They get all the benefits they could ask for, without having to pay a dime. When it came time to make budget cuts, they cut education instead of their own salaries. In my opinion, life would be a whole lot different, if they paid for even a portion of the things everyone else in the world has to pay for.

They also don’t participate in our health care, retirement or social security, which we all have to pay for. For some reason, all of the people representing our state have their own separate plans. It’s no wonder that none of them care about the problems everyone else is facing. It’s not fair to everyone who works hard for their money and has to save everything they can just so one day they can retire and not have to worry. Meanwhile, all these people have to do is serve four years and they’re set for life. I find that utterly ridiculous, but there is nothing we can do about it. The legislators are so focused on their party, democrat or republican, that they aren’t realizing what is truly best for the people of the state of Michigan. What happened to “of the people, by the people, for the people”?