When the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, there was much cause for concern. From burning rivers and smog to the contaminated Lake Erie and trash-lined highways it seemed our environment was on the brink of complete devastation. At least it did to a young fifth grader who commemorated the inaugural Earth Day with his classmates by embedding nails to the bottoms of dowel rods to pick up litter throughout the small town where I grew up.
Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting
Senate Bill 35, Authorize criminal penalties for nonpayment of “administrative hearing bureau” fines: Passed 35 to 1 in the Senate
To authorize additional penalties for failing to pay fines imposed by “administrative hearing bureaus” that most cities are allowed to create for enforcing "blight violations" under a 2003 law. Under that law, cities already have the power to place a lien against the property. The bill would authorize additional fines of $500, 93 days in jail for a second offense, and up to a year for a third offense.
(Editor's Note: The Detroit News on April 18, 2013, ran an op-ed on Medicaid expansion in Michigan by the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy, who was also the guest speaker at the Mackinac Center's Issues and Ideas forum on Obamacare and Medicaid held in Lansing the same day. The live video webcast is available at noon at www.mackinac.org/18414. Below is the text of The Detroit News piece.)
Welcome to the club, MLive.
The statewide, online media entity on Monday said it would run a weekly feature for its Saginaw News and Bay City Times readers on votes by mid-Michigan legislators using information supplied by MichiganVotes.org.
On Wednesday, MLive informed the Mackinac Center that it instead would be starting a statewide bill and vote tracking service of its own. To that we say "congratulations." The Mackinac Center has long been a proponent of transparency and open government, and the more organizations working to keep Michiganders informed of what the state Legislature does and how it spends your money is a welcome and positive development.
A new union was born recently in the Ann Arbor suburb of Dexter when several transportation employees in the Dexter Community Schools rallied together to form the West Washtenaw Bus Drivers and Monitors Association.
The new union is part of a growing type of labor organizing in Michigan, that of local-only unions. What makes many of these new unions special is that they are formed after workers rejected established larger unions.
Is Detroit Public Schools' Thirkell Elementary a remarkable success or an abysmal failure? It depends on who you ask.
Excellent Schools Detroit just named the DPS school one of the top Detroit-area schools. The organization reviewed more than 100 conventional, charter and private schools, and graded schools on test scores (both proficiency and growth), teacher and student surveys, and unannounced in-person observations.
Mackinac Center Editor Lindsey Dodge was a guest on “The Lucy Ann Lance Show” on WLBY AM1290 in Ann Arbor this morning, discussing proposed legislation meant to address an alleged gender pay gap. Dodge also addressed this issue in MLive recently and has written about it.
Let us begin with the admission your writer was into President Calvin Coolidge before the 30th president was rendered “cool.” But that hardly diminishes the accolades heaped upon Amity Shlaes’ latest tome, “Coolidge.”
Suffice to say it’s easy to praise a president who guarded the public fisc as prudently as he protected his own. The 1920s, after all, presented Silent Cal with a tremendous deficit as a result of World War I. But the public at large at the time was accustomed to a government that hadn’t yet grown to the Leviathan-like proportions that followed in subsequent administrations, and a majority actually supported financial restraint.
Avik Roy, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, was a guest on “The Tony Conley Show” on WILS AM 1320 in Lansing today. Roy will be the keynote speaker at a Mackinac Center Issues & Ideas forum at noon on April 18 in Lansing focusing on why Michigan should not expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting
Senate Bill 257, Expand “Business Improvement Zone” tax-and-spend entities: Passed 35 to 2 in the Senate
To expand the items that a “Business Improvement Zone” can spend money on, reduce the number of property owners in the district able to impose a zone's tax and spending powers and increase the number needed to dissolve them, increase the duration of the zones' powers to 10 years, reduce certain notification requirements required to establish one of these zones, allow the entity to sell services to particular property owners in the district, increase penalties for not paying the "special assessments" it imposes, and make other changes. These zones may be created by owners of a majority of the property in a certain area (not the same as the majority of owners), and have the power to impose property taxes (special assessments) to pay the debt the zone incurs to pay for projects that are supposed to benefit property owners in the zone.
In a piece for Slate, the left-leaning business and economics writer Matthew Yglesias says increasing subsidies for college won’t bring down the price.
In an effort to explain, he cites an article from Bloomberg Businessweek that shows that the number of administrators at Purdue University has jumped 54 percent — nearly eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track professors. Nationwide, the number of college and university administrators increased 10 times faster than tenured faculty.
Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman wrote this commentary about Michigan’s experience in becoming a right-to-work state and how other states can do the same for “Compass,” the magazine of the Illinois Policy Institute.
An online version is available here.
In 2012, teachers in Roscommon Area Public Schools took a bold step. They decertified from the Michigan Education Association and formed their own independent union.
According to the president of the new union, Jim Perialas, teachers are saving $400 a year in dues and getting better representation for the money. Breaking away from the MEA took time and effort. In an interview, Perialas offered tips for teachers considering similar action:
The next wave of television viewing, ironically, may more closely resemble the days of yore when home antennas dotted landscapes both urban and rural. Except this next generation antenna is no larger than a thumb drive that plugs conveniently into a tablet, smartphone or desktop computer.
Labor Policy Director F. Vincent Vernuccio was a panelist at the Spring 2013 Griffin Policy Forum at Central Michigan University Monday night, discussing the topic “The Future of Labor Unions in Michigan.” You can watch a video of the event here.
An alleged “gender pay gap” doesn’t take into account all of the necessary data that explains why men earn more than women, Mackinac Center Editor Lindsey Dodge told MLive. The online news service’s article came about after some legislators in Lansing announced their wishes to further regulate people’s private lives.
As described here and elsewhere, one provision of Obamacare seeks to tempt state legislatures into expanding state Medicaid eligibility and spending by placing 100 percent the expansion’s costs on the federal budget for the first three years, and 90 percent from the year 2020 on in perpetuity.
(Editor's note: Mackinac Center President Emeritus Lawrence W. Reed, now president of the Foundation for Economic Education, reflects on the passing of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom he met on two occasions.)
Paraphrasing St. Francis of Assisi, Margaret Thatcher ushered in her long and storied tenure as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister in 1979 with these words: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”
The 1980s were a heady time for political and cultural junkies. If the 1960s were an era where the distinctions between the two were blurred, the 1980s obliterated them completely.
Perhaps no public figure prior to President George W. Bush was vilified more by pop musicians than Margaret Thatcher. British musician piled on mercilessly from Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg to The Style Council, Genesis and Robert Wyatt.
“Individualism has come in for an enormous amount of criticism over the years. It still does. It is widely assumed to be synonymous with selfishness. … But the main reason why so many people in power have always disliked individualism is because it is individualists who are ever keenest to prevent the abuse of authority.” – Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World.
A rehashed report that is several years old and labeled “updated” from the Michigan Education Association that attempts to paint the Mackinac Center in a negative light has received minimal media interest.
According to The Saginaw News, the report claims the Center has a “hidden agenda.” Media Relations Manager Ted O’Neil pointed out how silly that claim is in light of the fact that the Center has more than 18,000 articles posted online.
The pantheon of rock journalism includes such recognizable names as Lester Bangs, Jann Wenner, Richard Meltzer, Robert Christgau and Michigan’s own Susan Whitall and Dave Marsh. Preceding them all, however, was Paul S. Williams, erstwhile editor of “Crawdaddy!” magazine and author of a shelf of books on the genre, who knocked down the door for all others to follow.
Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting
The House and Senate did not meet this week, so rather than votes this report instead contains several recently introduced bills of interest.
Senate Bill 251: Allow less than unlimited auto crash injury insurance
Introduced by Sen. Virgil Smith, Jr. (D), to allow auto insurance companies to offer policies in which the maximum personal injury protection coverage (PIP) is $50,000. The current no-fault insurance law mandates that vehicle owners buy unlimited personal injury coverage. Referred to committee, no further action at this time.
Research Associate Jarrett Skorup was interviewed on 1320 WILS's "Tony Conley Morning Show" today regarding the updated job numbers to CapCon's breaking news story from last summer regarding Mascoma Corp., the "green" energy company.
Mascoma Corp. received more than $100 million from the federal government and $20 million from the state of Michigan to build a plant in Northern Michigan. They promised to create 70 jobs, and so far three jobs have been reported. Promises to build the plant by 2012 were not fulfilled either.
The Center for Michigan recently made the claim that retaining 5-year-olds for another year of kindergarten doesn’t work. The evidence they provide for this is weak, but that aside, this appears to run counter to their other argument that an additional year of state-funded preschool for 4-year-olds yields huge benefits.
