Critics of school choice often complain that parents aren’t capable of making wise decisions when selecting a school for their children, and so the government should choose for them. Many parents in perhaps the nation’s worst urban school district, however, recently showed that they are eager to find good school alternatives.
WEYI-TV25 in Saginaw and WPBN-TV7&4 in Traverse City are reporting that the Michigan Legislature is considering protecting Michigan’s labor force under a right-to-work law.
Paul Kersey, labor policy director, told the stations that not having a right-to-work law has cost Michigan jobs and dissuaded businesses from locating in Michigan. A right-to-work law also would have prevented the forced unionization of home-based day care owners, which the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation is suing the Department of Human Services over.
A Missaukee County circuit court judge ruled Tuesday that the Department of Natural Resources and Environment “exceeded its statutory authority by denying the permit to install based upon need,” when it rejected a clean air permit application for a coal plant to be built by Wolverine Power Cooperative near Rogers City, according to the Presque Isle County Advance.
While driving through West Texas recently I was struck by the stark reality of energy policy and production in the United States. Between Abilene and Midland, Texas, there are thousands of windmills. The wind was blowing but most of the windmills sat idle. Virtually no workers or productive activity could be seen among the thousands of windmills towering over the prairie. As I drove closer to Midland, Texas, which is located in the middle of the Permian Basin oil patch, it was an entirely different scene with much activity as oil field workers tended wells, many which have long passed their peak production.
An Op-Ed by state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton Township, in today’s Detroit News cites research by Mike LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, showing the positive economic benefits of eliminating the Michigan Business Tax.
Replacing the MBT and its onerous 22 percent surcharge with nothing would yield 57,000 net new jobs in the first year after repeal and nearly 121,000 jobs by 2016, according to LaFaive’s calculations.
In a recent appearance on the Frank Beckmann radio show where I discussed Gov. Rick Snyder's proposed business tax cut and reforms, the issue of taxing pension income arose. A number of retired government employees phoned in strenuously objecting to any income tax on their pensions.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in a new Cato Journal article, Richard Vedder (also a Mackinac Center adjunct scholar) finds that from 2000 to 2008, "some 4.7 million Americans moved from forced-union to right-to-work states," and that over a 30-year period beginning in 1977, "right-to-work states experienced a 23% faster rise in per capita income." This reinforces similar findings in Mackinac Center studies published in 2007 and 2002.
The Jan. 30 Op-Ed page of The Oakland Press featured three Viewpoint commentaries from three different Mackinac Center experts.
President Joseph G. Lehman wrote about the importance of paying attention to what elected officials do once they are in office, rather than what they say they will do when trying to get elected.
Gov. Rick Snyder unveiled a 21-page Michigan “Citizen’s Guide” yesterday that shows public employee compensation levels here have grown to nearly twice those of the private sector, and that this disparity has increased over the past decade.
In addition, Gov. Snyder's commitment to an overhaul of the state’s business tax with a net tax cut will require reductions in government and public school spending, most which goes to employee salaries and benefits.
An editorial in the Holland Sentinel that says the “gap between public, private sector compensation is unjustifiable, unsustainable,” cites research by Fiscal Policy Analyst James Hohman on the issue.
Hohman found that public-sector benefits in Michigan outpace those in the private sector by $5.7 billion annually.
Proposed legislation that would offer subsidies to companies the state contracts with if those companies hire Michigan-based workers would increase costs, Fiscal Policy Director Michael LaFaive told WEYI-TV25.
“We know that prevailing wage adds 15 percent to 20 percent to the cost of constructing new school buildings, for instance,” LaFaive said.
The Hangar42 film studio scandal in Grand Rapids continues to grow. This week a second person was charged with felony fraud for allegedly inflating the sale price of a piece of property in order to get more tax credits from the state. Some film incentive supporters may argue that since the scam was caught early enough (thanks to the Mackinac Center), no tax credits were granted and therefore Michigan taxpayers lost no money in the deal.
Mlive.com reports that Detroit Public Schools signed contracts with private vendors to clean and maintain the district’s buildings. DPS will join 145 other school districts in Michigan that contract out for these services.
The moves are expected to save the district $75 million over five years, a significant amount of savings. Thirty-two districts were new to custodial service contracting in 2010 and were expecting to save $14 million in the first year of their contracts.
Although details are not yet clear, according to early reports Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed Michigan Business Tax replacement appears to be good news for advocates of sound economic policy. Whatever the final details, lowering the tax burden on job providers and making the system much less complex will surely provide a boost for commerce in the Great Lakes State.
The House and Senate took no votes on legislation, so this report instead contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
House Bill 4139 (Require government employee health benefit eligibility
audits)
Introduced by Rep. Tim Melton (D), to require state and local governments, schools,
colleges and universities to immediately perform audits to determine that all
persons covered by the health insurance benefits the unit provides are actually
eligible to receive them. Referred to committee, no further action at this
time.
A Detroit News editorial today taking the Michigan Education Association to task for blocking education reform cites research by Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek that shows public school funding in Michigan is 16th highest in the nation, yet student performance “ranks between 33rd and 39th on national fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council has just published a “State Legislators Guide to Repealing ObamaCare.” However, the 15-point summary prepared by ALEC staff and posted below is a Mackinac Center/MichCapCon.com online exclusive, because to our knowledge this bullet-point version not been published except in hard copy:
It appears that the political hype surrounding alternative fuels is based more on wishful thinking than facts. RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group, recently released a study that concludes alternative fuels do not benefit the military. As reported by The New York Times, the study resulted from a directive in the 2009 Defense Authorization Act calling for further study of alternative fuels in military vehicles and aircraft.
In today's lead editorial, The Wall Street Journal attributes America's lackluster economic recovery in part to the politically orchestrated misallocation of scarce resources, including subsidies for alternative energy. Says The Journal, “. . . if wind turbines are a good business, they will find a market on their own. If wind power turns out to be an uncompetitive bust, then the government will have misallocated hundreds of billions more dollars that could have found more productive uses.”
Mike LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, told The Saginaw News that President Obama’s State of the Union speech reminded him of Gov. Granholm.
“It was almost Granholm-esque in many parts,” LaFaive said. “I found that these investments in clean energy rang hollow to me.”
A scandal first exposed by the Mackinac Center last June has led to a second set of felony fraud charges filed by the state Attorney General, according to The Grand Rapids Press. The charges stem from an alleged conspiracy to obtain a state subsidy worth as much as $10 million through "false documentation" purporting to show a property transfer that constituted the basis for the subsidy claim. The transfer never actually occurred, however.
A friend of mine who works at a Kroger in metro Detroit passed along his thoughts on the "Item Pricing" law, and I figure they're worth sharing:
Snyder's right. It's a waste of time for us and basically a game for customers to "Item Price" us. The Item Pricing Law gives folks five times the difference if they are overcharged with a $5 maximum. Fortunately the game players are only allowed to do this with one item at a time, so if we're dealing with a lot of price changes this is the one break the store gets.
The first three weeks of Gov. Snyder’s administration has provided plenty to cheer, especially on fiscal policy issues.
Cheer No. 1: Candidate Snyder said more than once that the extraordinary cost of providing expensive and generous benefits to public employees would need to be reduced. He then repeated this as Governor-elect Snyder in a Washington Post article. In his first State of the State speech he courageously brought up the state’s massive unfunded post-retirement employee benefits liabilities and costs, which theoretically exceed $50 billion. Our new governor appears to be ready to address these fiscal policy problems openly and directly.
It is encouraging that members of the newly elected Michigan Legislature are taking action to thwart over-zealous environmental regulations that are killing jobs in Michigan. Rep. Greg MacMaster, R-Kewadin, has introduced House Bill 4044, which seeks to get a handle on the cost of environmental regulation in the state.
Today is the 5th anniversary of Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s promise that Michigan residents would be “blown away” by the gobs of jobs her latest economic development program would create. How ironic then that she of all people would flee the state to find work. She is certainly not the first governor to do so, but her failed promise of economic nirvana—timed to coincide after she had safely left office—is one that should not be forgotten by those left behind.
