Across the upper Midwest, in Michigan and neighboring states, lawmakers are beginning to focus on unions — especially government employee unions — and the damaging role they have played.
In Michigan, Rep. Amanda Price, R-Holland, has introduced a bill to repeal the state's prevailing wage law, which prohibits granting government construction project contracts to the lowest bidder unless the company pays union scale wages. Enacted at a time when unions made up a much larger part of the construction work force, this law adds 10 percent to the cost of infrastructure and other projects. Currently less than a quarter of construction workers in Michigan are union members, and unionized or not they all tend to make above-average wages anyway. Rep. Price's bill would allow the state to make use of the same construction market as private companies and individuals.
Every week, MichiganVotes.org sends a report on interesting votes and bills in the Michigan Legislature, and includes how each legislator voted. To find out who your state senator is and how to contact him or her go here; for state representatives go here.
MLive.com reports on a story that Michigan Capitol Confidential broke regarding right-to-work legislation introduced in the Michigan House and Senate.
MichiganVotes.org provides the details on Senate Bill 120 and House Bill 4054.
Replacing the Michigan Business Tax with a flat corporate income tax would help Michigan improve 26 places in the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation’s rankings, according to The Bay City Times.
Fiscal Policy Director Michael LaFaive testified before the state Senate Finance Committee Wednesday about the benefits of eliminating the MBT. He also said that replacing the tax with nothing could help create more than 120,000 jobs by 2016.
Michael LaFaive, director of the Center's Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, testified today before the state Senate Finance Committee on the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax. You can read his full testimony here.
Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek told The Detroit News he would give Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, an “I” for impossible in grading Bobb’s nearly two-year tenure with the district.
“The reality is things are much worse than they appear, and he doesn’t have the tools to be able to get out of this deficit.”
A recent article in Slate by Robert Bryce describes how Texas has more wind generator capacity than any other state — around 9,700 megawatts. But last August, when state electricity demand set a one-day record of 63,494 megawatts, all those windmills contributed just 500 megawatts, or about 5 percent of their rated capacity.
Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Mackinac Center and president of the Foundation for Economic Education, is scheduled to be a guest on John Stossel’s show on Fox Business Network at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 10. The show re-airs at midnight. Reed will discuss free-market economics, spontaneous order and Leonard Read’s famous essay, “I, Pencil.”
The Washington Examiner reports that Chrysler paid nearly $9 million for the longest ad in Super Bowl history, despite complaints from the company about the terms of a $15 billion taxpayer loan it received.
The article quotes David Littmann, the Center’s senior economist, from a December interview with The Examiner in which he said of Michigan, “We’re not even on the map. We have bargain basement prices on everything — from water properties, which are a hallmark of growth, to infrastructure. And this is tied together with a large and progressive highway system. We also have the largest underground gas reserves in the nation."
(Editor’s note: Most of this post originally appeared as an e-mail alert from the John Locke Foundation on Feb. 7, 2011.)
As reported in MichCapCon last Saturday, actions by Michigan state agencies to implement various Obamacare provisions now violate the binding judgment of a federal judge, who ruled the entire 2,700-page bill, officially titled the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," "must be declared void," because its key "individual mandate" provision violates the Constitution. The law is not dead yet, but that wasn't the only good news last week for those who think it should be. Here's a summary:
The Macomb Daily is reporting about a story the Mackinac Center first covered involving a carpenters union that is targeting a Grand Rapids-area business whose employees do not belong to the union.
Read more about the issue, and watch a video on the union’s “bannering” using protesters who do not work for the company nor are they union members, here.
The Holland Sentinel reports that a new study by Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek on virtual learning says online education can improve student performance and save money.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was a unique voice in the latter half of the 20th century. He championed freedom in the face of spreading global communism and domestic naysayers. His vision of "morning in America" helped to renew patriotism and revive optimism after a period of national insecurity and economic malaise.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics provided some encouraging news that indicated Michigan’s economy continues to recover. The state’s private sector added 221,292 jobs in the second quarter of 2010 and lost only 184,025.
The net creation of 37,267 jobs was the best quarter the state had since the first quarter of 2001.
The House and Senate only met one day this week due to a blizzard, and only voted on one highly technical hereditary trusts bill, so this report instead contains several newly introduced bills of interest, including ones to ban “bridge cards” for college students, limit government employee health benefits, repeal the state “prevailing wage” law and more.
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.
