Gov. Gretchen Whitmer demonstrated the skill of a long-serving politician Tuesday while pettifogging her role in the Line 5 stalemate.
“There has been no change to Line 5,” Whitmer said during her debate with challenger Tudor Dixon. “No change.”
This is precisely true. The necessary, long-delayed environmental improvements to Line 5 remain on hold. The governor’s quixotic campaign to shut down the pipeline is also stalled, facing opposition from federal, state and provincial authorities on both sides of the border and having lost two key rounds in federal court. Nor has the regime uncertainty over the future of the international pipeline improved during Whitmer’s tenure.
In her election advertisements, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer promotes her success at balancing the budget without raising taxes. Michigan has gone without tax increases during her tenure, but that wasn’t for lack of trying on Whitmer’s part.
In her first year of office, Whitmer proposed to increase fuel taxes by $2.5 billion in order to spend $1.9 billion on roads and the rest on her other priorities. She mocked legislators for proposing “phony political ‘fixes’ and half-measures,” by not increasing taxes. And she claimed that anything less than a tax increase that raised $2.5 billion tax was not serious.
A rise in contested school board races has led many in the media to start paying attention to these races.
The Detroit News reports:
Nonpartisan school board races across Michigan are anything but this election season. Super PAC money, attack ads and expensive social media campaigns have elevated once-quiet, historically independent races into emotional battlegrounds between parents and nonparents, conservatives and progressives and everyone in between with an opinion or agenda.
This article originally appeared at Townhall October 15, 2022.
When a teacher pays dues to a union, how is that money used? Probably not as the teacher expects.
Consider a timely news report out of Ohio. Teachers in the state’s Hilliard City Schools recently participated in an initiative backed by the National Education Association’s LGBTQ+ Caucus, which urged faculty to wear badges featuring the words “I’m Here.” The goal, according to the initiative’s website, is for teachers to “Show your students you’re a safe person.”
This article originally appeared in The Hill Sept. 17, 2022.&
President Biden’s plan to have taxpayers cover the cost of canceling student debt has come under fire from many sides, but there is one thing everybody can agree on: The cost of college has gotten out of hand.
This article originally appeared in The Hill September 3, 2022.
Workers have been trying to unionize Starbucks, Amazon, news groups and automakers, sometimes successfully. This has caused commenters to wonder — again — whether this means unions in America are back.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News August 24 2022.
For the second time in under a year, a U.S. District Court Judge has ruled against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. The federal court rejected Nessel’s argument that state actions to shutter the Line 5 pipeline should be considered in a state court, upholding the federal government’s jurisdiction over interstate and international pipelines.
This article originally appeared in The Hill August 22, 2022.
It’s common to hear people refer to states as “red” or “blue,” or even “purple,” based on whether a majority of Republicans or Democrats get elected. It would be a mistake to think that red states are all the same or that blue states all enact the same kinds of policies. States are far more complex than these partisan caricatures suggest, and policies are based as much on what is popular as they are by their political officeholders.
Arizona became the second state to offer all school age children an education scholarship that their parents can use to support their education as they choose. I speak about it with Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute, a free market think tank in Arizona, on this Overton Window podcast. He also talked about how this scholarship can change the face of education.
This article originally appeared in The Hill October 1, 2022.
Nuclear power is back in vogue, buoyed by the demand for a significant source of emissions-free energy. Government should encourage the trend by ending policies that prevent the only reliable carbon dioxide-neutral energy source from flourishing.
Which candidate for governor supports handing over taxpayer money to business owners and managers? In an advertisement against Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, the Democratic Governors Association alleges that she wants “tax giveaways for billionaires.”
Traverse City’s public electric utility, Traverse City Light & Power, launched a government-owned internet network in 2020. TCLPfiber is backed by tens of millions of tax dollars and is rolling out in five phases, with broadband being built out and plans sold to customers.
Midland is Michigan’s top performing metropolitan area in an index of economic freedom. It is also the only metro area in Michigan with an economic freedom score that exceeds the national average. This is important because higher economic freedom scores typically do better on important outcomes — such as employment growth — than those with lower ones.
In March 2022, the city of Detroit laid out plans to build and manage its own broadband network. The stated goal is to hook up every address in Detroit to “world class fiber optic connectivity” for half what high-speed internet currently costs. Well, it’s off to a poor start.
If college affordability is a crisis, is the answer to throw more money at the problem?
When passing the state budget in June, lawmakers set aside $250 million for a scholarship program but did not sketch out the details.
Now, they’ve approved a program that will provide $5,500 annually for students attending state universities for up to five years and $2,750 annually for students attending community college for up to three years. Eligibility is based on income, but the cutoff is high: students whose families make $120,000 or less annually would likely qualify.
Legislators approved a bill in September to spend an extra $1 billion, and the package includes $596.1 million in new business subsidies.
The money goes into a program created in 2021 that hands out money to select companies. The amount a company can receive is not subject to any limit other than what legislators have allocated into the fund. Legislators also required any deal to be confirmed by the legislature’s appropriations committees.
Shifting the Overton Window can take a lot. It can take important research to answer vital questions. Digging deep to tell the stories about the people harmed by the status quo, clever marketing and careful outreach. And lots of patience. Jarrett Skorup helped put all of these together for his work to change Michigan’s civil asset forfeiture laws, and I speak with him about it for this week’s Overton Window podcast.
The Michigan legislature approved almost $850 million for new corporate handout deals last week. Research shows that these types of subsidies are ineffective and expensive, but there was a silver lining. It was an appropriation made in a very public way and thanks to a law that demands modestly more transparency and accountability than past business subsidy dealings.
Michigan needs more people working as nurses, but it’s become harder to find them. This has led to an increase in hospitals using travel nurses and the companies who staff them.
Because of the increase in demand, staffing companies can charge high prices and travel nurses are making a lot of money. Hospitals and nursing homes would prefer to pay less money for this service, so they are supporting House Bill 6364 which would limit how much these temp agencies can charge.
Michigan has just over 32,000 prisoners and spent $1.4 billion on them in the latest fiscal year. That’s more than $40,000 per prisoner. This hefty price tag is often compared to school funding, which amounts to “just” $17,000 per student.
A union-backed school board candidate cites this difference in spending as a reason Michigan schools need more money. The ratio of student-to-inmate spending has been made into popular memes and gifs. The Washington Post says we need to redirect money from prisons to schools. The Daily Mail contrasts this as “incarceration vs. education.”
Michigan’s Strategic Fund awarded $25.5 million this week to a project at the former General Motors steering division plant in Saginaw. The deal promises to “retain 1,100 jobs” while helping what sounds like a market innovator: Motion control technology company Nexteer boasts the power to accelerate mobility in order to make it “safe, green and exciting,” according to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s announcement of the payment.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy recommends a NO vote on the conference report for Senate Bill 844, the budget supplemental expected to be considered in both houses later today. We specifically oppose the $846.1 million line item for deposit into the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve Fund.
Elected officials want to pass popular legislation. They have to rely upon their senses to figure it out when they deal with complicated issues. One way politicians make sense of what voters want is to listen to the conversation going on across the country and the reaction to laws that are passed in other states. Jonathan Williams, the chief economist and executive vice president of policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council, helps legislators hear what is going on in other states at the conventions his organization hosts. I speak with him about it for this week’s Overton Window podcast.
Just over 10 years ago, the Hoosier State adopted a powerful economic development tool in the form of a right-to-work law. This law simply states that workers need not be required to financially support or join a union to keep their jobs. Scholarship generally shows right-to-work laws are beneficial to workers and to job providers in states that adopt them. Our new research shows this as well.
Companies lobby state governments for grants, loans, tax breaks and other favors. Greg LeRoy at Good Jobs First wants state lawmakers to deny those requests. And I speak with him about it for this week’s Overton Window podcast.
“The things that benefit all employers — a good school system, efficient infrastructure, public safety, public health, the lowest tax rate and the broadest tax base to allow for efficient fair government and public services — all those suffer because now you’re hoarding and putting a lot of eggs in a few baskets,” LeRoy says.
