Last week legislation was introduced by Republicans in the Michigan Senate to create a state Obamacare insurance "exchange" here (Senate Bill 595, sponsored by Sen. Roger Kahn, R-Saginaw, and cosponsored by Republicans John Pappageorge from Troy and Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville from Monroe).
The incomprehensible attacks of 10 years ago remain fresh in the memories and heart-wrenching in the emotions of all who witnessed them. I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., at the time and vividly recall feeling what I had only experienced in nightmares — helplessness in witnessing brutality that caused the mind to rebel. People responded to what we saw with repeated denial: This can’t be happening. Fear was heightened by continuing reports of hijacked planes headed into the district. Officials did not know whether we would be safer in our building — across the street from the Capitol — or out on the streets. Rumors of a car bomb at the State Department and smoke from the Old Executive Office Building added to the confusion. If our leaders had contingencies for such an attack, no one seemed to know what they were or how to implement them.
During a taping of “Off the Record,” Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville reportedly announced a plan to pass legislation that would ensure that teachers could continue to work in public schools without paying union dues or fees. The Michigan Education Association has already voiced its objections to this “right-to-teach” law, which would put it in a position of needing to ask teachers to support the union voluntarily. Depending on how the state’s 100,000 or so public school teachers respond, this could dramatically reduce the resources available to both the MEA and the Michigan Federation of Teachers, two of the state’s most formidable lobbying groups. Both of these teachers unions have steadfastly resisted education reforms.
Under two proposals just introduced or possibly coming soon in the
Senate Bill 618, introduced by
Lou Schimmel, an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center, has been appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder as emergency manager for the city of Pontiac, according to Mlive.com.
Schimmel was appointed to a similar role by Gov. John Engler in Hamtramck in 2001. He also served as a court-appointed receiver for the city of Ecorse from 1986 to 1989, eliminating a $6 million budget overspending crisis.
Green energy subsidies and mandates invariably join corporations and government in an unholy alliance as companies seek to gain financially from government largesse. Of course, these so called public–private partnerships are designed to pick winners and losers with taxpayers footing the bills. It is necessary for government funds to keep flowing to the chosen companies so that the next generation of taxpayers can be convinced of the importance of the green cause.
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week.
Senate Bill 472, Expand "development rights
agreements": Passed 28 to 9 in the Senate
To require (rather than just allow) "development rights agreements"
to be granted to the owner of a vacant parcel 15 acres or larger who requests
this, and allow these to go into effect without legislative approval, which is
required under current law. "Development rights agreements" give a
landowner property tax breaks in return for foregoing future development.
Paul Kersey, labor policy director, told the Detroit Free Press that President Obama’s speech Thursday night left him with questions as to “why he didn’t put some ideas of his own on the table to be cut.” Kersey also said he felt the president was more “projecting an attitude than a legislative package.”
By Jack McHugh
A short new paper by Mackinac Center Adjunct Scholar John Graham explains “Why Health Exchanges Don’t Work.” It was released this week by the Pacific Research Institute.
State health insurance “exchanges” are one of the linchpins of ObamaCare. They are loosely modeled after the health insurance “Connector” in the Massachusetts “RomneyCare” system of state-subsidized health coverage. But even the leading defender of the exchange concept, the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier, has condemned the “ObamaCare” version as a corruption of the idea. In a recent report he said:
Go ahead and call me naive, but for the moment I'm willing to give the Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa the benefit of the doubt that his rant yesterday in Detroit was not a call for violence. If anyone needs more evidence that the union establishment has been hijacked by leftish ideologues though, Hoffa left a pretty clear indicator of what his real priorities are.
Many in the political class cling to an economic myth that government creates jobs. Economic reality is that the private sector creates jobs, but government policies often are extremely effective at killing jobs. Often time the best thing the government can do is to cause no more harm — case in point are job-killing air rules coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency.
A recent editorial in The Detroit News calling for expanded school choice cites this recent blog post by Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman, saying “concerns over diminished local control seem unfounded.”
Russ Harding, the Center’s senior environmental policy analyst, has been appointed to the Occupational Licensing Advisory Rules Committee by the state’s Office of Regulatory Reinvention, according to the Midland Daily News.
The committee will help the ORR identify “duplicative, obsolete, unnecessary or unduly restrictive occupational licensing rules,” among the 91 occupations the state regulates, the Daily News reported.
Here is the cumulative list of all MichiganVotes "Weekly Roll Call Report" votes for 2011. These will be updated on a regular basis, and a new version started in 2012.
Every week MichiganVotes.org sends these reports to newspapers around the state, showing how just the state representatives and senators in their service area voted during the past week. They focus on the most politically revealing votes (what they do vs. what they say), plus the most important votes on matters of policy, and some that are just interesting. A cumulative list of all these votes is a useful reference source, if not a fully comprehensive one.
Mlive recently reported that Inc. Magazine lists five of the top 500 fastest growing companies in America as Michigan-based:
On a per-capita basis, this is not a strong performance for a state of nearly 10 million people, but a company's growth relies on more than just the population of its home state. More interesting is that none of the companies listed appear to have been selected by the state’s economic development agency for special favors. None have been granted selective MEGA tax breaks or subsidies, for example.
This week's report:
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week. The House and Senate are in the midst of a summer break, so rather than votes this report instead contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
With
Majority rule is supposed to be a fundamental principle of labor law: if workers want a union, they get one. If they don’t want one, they don’t have to have one. Workers have a right to join a union, but also a right to reject unionization. That’s not the case any more thanks to a recent National Labor Relations Board ruling in the case of Lamons Gasket, a gasket and bolt manufacutring company in Houston, that opens the door for collusive unionization.
All too often, township officials around the state seem to have a double standard when it comes to permitting wind farms vs. other developments. In many townships, property owners are dismayed to find that many uses of their property are controlled by a myriad of rules and ordinances. The same level of local government control does not always apply to wind farm developers.
The founder of a self-described “centrist” think tank praises a recent statistical analysis by Mackinac Center experts regarding needed changes in Michigan’s liquor pricing and distribution system in an Op-Ed for today’s Livingston Daily Press & Argus.
An editorial in today’s Detroit News on school reform cites work by Mackinac Center analysts that shows Michigan could save $5.7 billion annually if public-sector benefits were brought into balance with those offered in the private sector.
James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy, addressed recent legislative changes regarding savings from school employee health insurance yesterday in Michigan Capitol Confidential.
Keynesian economics — “stimulus” or deficit spending by the government to “prime the pump” of a slow economy — is one symptom of a central planning approach to growing an economy at the national level, vs. adopting policies that unfetter entreprenuerial free market capitalism. Any pretentions to its intellectual validity were demolished by the “stagflation” of the 1970s, when the theory’s prescriptions led not to prosperity but to something it predicted could not happen: high unemployment and high inflation. Remember the 1980 “misery index?” (Unemployment rate plus inflation.)
Ken Braun, managing editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential, was a guest recently on “The Frank Beckmann Show” on WJR 760AM, where he discussed a recent article that exposed how the city of Lansing is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on golf courses it owns while at the same time contemplating laying off dozens of police officers.
A recent story in Michigan Capitol Confidential about Michigan International Speedway receiving more than $18 million in taxpayer subsidies is highlighted in a Detroit News editorial today that calls for an end to what it calls “special deals in the tax code.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s war on energy, which has been fought primarily in the political trenches of Washington, is about to be taken to the streets and neighborhoods of America.
The EPA has launched an unprecedented attack on coal-fired power plants through a plethora of rule makings that will take effect in the near future. The proposed rules have the common goal of eliminating coal as a source of fuel to generate electricity. The new EPA rules are bad news for Michigan which currently generates about two-thirds of its electricity from coal-fired power plants. Replacing these with unreliable wind energy is not practical. Power plants fueled by natural gas can replace lost production from shuttered coal plants, but the cost of electricity will necessarily increase. Michigan already has the highest electric rates in the region and a further increase in electricity rates will only further erode the state’s competiveness in creating jobs.
