According to MIRS Capitol Capsule (subscription required), the Michigan Lodging and Tourism Association (MLTA) is "hoping to send a clear message to lame duck legislative leaders — don't you leave town without funding Pure Michigan."
The private trade group wants public funds to advance their industry, and to this end they've launched a billboard campaign:
Editorials in both the Port Huron Times-Herald and Livingston Daily Press & Argus about the changes in the Michigan Legislature due to term limits cite research by Senior Legislative Analyst Jack McHugh that first appeared in Michigan Capitol Confidential.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released a key measure of economic growth that showed Michigan has gone more than a decade without increased production. New gross domestic product figures, a measure of the value of an area’s goods and services production, showed that Michigan’s economy produced 8 percent less in 2009 than it did in 2000 when adjusted for inflation. The nation rose 15 percent during this period.
Teacher salaries and school district spending transparency are the focus of two Detroit News articles today that rely on the expertise of Mackinac Center analysts.
“We’re at the crossroads of trying to maintain a government and school system that we’ve grown accustomed to as a relatively rich state,” Education Policy Director Mike Van Beek told The News. “And now we’re a relatively poor state.”
Senior Economist David Littmann is the primary source for a Detroit Free Press article today regarding GM’s IPO, saying it is in “fine shape.”
Littmann said investors are attracted to the stock offering due to GM’s cost-cutting following bankruptcy last year.
A Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives could mean an easing on the federal fuel standards that many think would harm American automakers, Senior Environmental Analyst Russ Harding told Bloomberg recently.
“This stuff that Obama and some of the Democrats are talking about on the fuel standards is fantasyland,” Harding said. “You’re not going to achieve those numbers with technology we know about in this day and age.”
A "multidimensional" crisis that's been unfolding for decades may finally be coming to a head in the Detroit Public Schools: The district is virtually bankrupt, the schools are unsafe and they generate the worst student achievement results in the nation. And now, Robert Bobb, the governor-appointed emergency financial manager, is waving the white flag, asking the state to borrow against future revenues to bail out the district. Doing so would be unfortunate for both students and state taxpayers.
Last month, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced that Robbin Wolff, a former bookkeeper for UAW Local 383 in Benton Harbor, had been sentenced to two years in prison for embezzling more than $200,000 in union funds. Wolff pled guilty to embezzlement and falsifying union records last July.
It appears likely the starry-eyed promise of Hollywood has left the taxpayers of Allen Park with quite the handful of overpriced real estate.
This unhappy ending seems to be in line with how events have unfolded since the “groundbreaking” at Allen Park’s Unity Studios.
(The following is an edited version of a letter to the editor of The Detroit News in response to their editorial "Ours: Keep film credits for now." The Mackinac Center and others have written extensively on this subject and disagree with the notion that the Michigan Film Incentive program is a policy lever necessary to the economic well-being of the Great Lakes State.)
In an important article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the brilliant George Gilder deconstructs many of the pious falsehoods promulgated by dangerous "green energy" lobbyists, corporate subsidy-seekers and politicians on both sides of the aisle who ignorantly pander to them. The article uses California as a poster-child to show how so-called "green energy" is paving the way to national bankruptcy and irrelevancy.
Over the course of his administration, a governor will be expected to make hundreds of appointments to regulatory agencies and boards. Among the more important will be the members of the state's Civil Service Commission.
Under the state constitution, the CSC has the responsibility for overseeing the state's workforce of over 52,000 people and setting job descriptions, duties and compensation. The CSC has essentially delegated much of that responsibility to a collective bargaining process that is very similar to the Public Employment Relations Act, but the CSC retains control of the overall process.
The Grand Rapids Press reports that teachers in Saugatuck Public Schools will no longer be provided with health insurance from the Michigan Education Special Services Association, an arm of the state's largest teachers union. The district instead will purchase employee insurance from Priority Health, a move that is said to save $3,800 per teacher annually.
Every week, MichiganVotes.org sends a report to newspapers and TV stations showing how just the state legislators in each publication's service area voted on the most important and interesting bills and amendments of the past seven days. The version shown here instead contains a link to the complete roll call tally in either the House or Senate. To find out who your state senator is and how to contact him or her go here; for state representatives go here.
In Gov. Jennifer Granholm's weekly radio address, she ballyhoos her investment missions abroad by claiming that they're responsible for creating or retaining 20,000 Michigan jobs. Unfortunately, she continues to mistake job announcements for job creation.
In a recent Detroit Free Press article, Doug Pratt of the Michigan Education Association argued that school employees have become victims of considerable budget cuts. Expressing confidence that Gov-elect Rick Snyder will make decisions based on data, Pratt adds, "When you set the rhetoric aside, the data is (sic) on our side."
Michigan's roads and bridges are crumbling while the federal government is throwing money at states for the purpose of building high-speed rail lines. A week before the elections MLive.com reported that Congressman John Dingell announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation will award the state $150 million dollars for a high-speed intercity passenger rail program and an additional $3.2 million to pay for project planning. The federal economic stimulus plan includes $8 billion for building nine lines for bullet trains, including one from Detroit to Chicago.
The fall fundraiser for public radio supposedly ended in October, in the middle of the Juan Williams' firing imbroglio. And yet this morning, Nov. 11, my local NPR affiliate here in mid-Michigan was still interrupting programming to request listener donations.
Reportedly the Michigan Legislature is considering legislation to prohibit young drivers from having more than one non-related passenger in the car.
Restrictions on minors are a public policy issue on which people of principle can reasonably disagree. On a similar bill several years ago, state Sen. Mickey Switalski, D-Roseville, eloquently made the emotional case for fewer restrictions, concluding with a very personal reminiscence. Here's what he said on the Senate floor on Oct. 6, 2004:
The lead investor in the Hangar42 movie studio deal was in court today for a preliminary exam, according to The Grand Rapids Press. Joseph Peters is charged with attempted false pretenses over $20,000.
Attention was first drawn to Hangar42 after the Mackinac Center broke the story following a months-long investigation by Center analysts, including a call for the Michigan Attorney General to investigate. Fiscal Policy Director Mike LaFaive and Communications Specialist Kathy Hoekstra raised several questions about the matter with an essay and investigative video posted May 20. At issue was the value of the proposed film studio, which those involved said was worth $40 million, even though it had been listed by a real estate agent for $10 million shortly before the deal was announced.
During her eight years as a member of the Michigan Senate, Nancy Cassis has been a stalwart defender of free enterprise and the principle of a "fair field with no favors" provided by government to particular corporations. She has often been a lonely opponent to the massive expansion of state corporate welfare that the Granholm administration and legislators on both sides of the aisle have substituted for genuine pro-growth economic policies.
Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey was a guest recently on "The Greg Marshall Show" on WMKT-AM1270 in Charlevoix, where he discussed how taxpayers foot the bill for public-sector union dues, the need for right-to-work protections in Michigan and how unions spend a fraction of the dues they take from workers on collective bargaining.
Billions of taxpayer dollars are being thrown at green energy projects in the form of subsidies and tax credits by the federal and state governments. Government is using taxpayer money in financing a high-risk bet that green energy will be successful in replacing fossil fuels that provide the majority of energy that Americans use to power their factories, heat their homes and fuel their vehicles.
David Littmann, senior economist at the Mackinac Center, is cited in The Detroit News today in a story about rising gasoline prices.
The News reports that the Federal Reserve's recent announcement to buy $600 billion worth of government bonds "will force the value of an already weak dollar to plunge further."
Michigan State University continues to investigate potential plagiarism by one of its professors in a school consolidation study, according to the Student Free Press Association.
"This remains a troubling case for two reasons," Senior Director of Communications Michael Jahr told the SFPA. "First, no action appears to have been taken regarding a professor who copied material from other sources without attribution. Second, even though the scholarship in this study was debunked by our education policy director, as well as the author of an earlier report that the study was based on, it continues to be treated as academically sound by some media outlets and MSU."
