An Op-Ed by Mike LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, in today's Detroit Free Press highlights the failures and costs of Michigan's film subsidy program.
An extensive list of commentaries on the program by Mackinac Center analysts can be found here.
A recent study commissioned by Booth Newspapers and conducted by Michigan State University's Education Policy Center concludes that Michigan would save $612 million by consolidating school districts at the county level. While the methodology remains highly suspect, the study suffers from a far greater problem: It appears to contain significant amounts of plagiarized material.
"Strange bedfellows" is a well-known political phenomenon that refers to ideological opponents sometimes finding common ground on a particular issue. In today's Wall Street Journal, anti-corporation gadfly and sometimes-Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader makes the case that, "A convergence of liberal-progressives with conservative-libertarians centering on the autocratic, corporate-dominated nature of our government may be growing."
Why are environmentalists not demanding a high level of environmental scrutiny to the proposed development of windmills in the Great Lakes? Invariably, environmental groups demand detailed environmental analysis of any project, from bottled water plants to golf courses, that could have a potential impact on the environment. Perhaps environmentalists are less concerned about protecting the Great Lakes than they are about pursuing an environmental ideology that considers carbon as the number one global threat to the environment. In any case, the main concern should be in protecting the Great Lakes. Michigan residents should demand the following common-sense safeguards be put in place before any even considering locating windmills in the Great Lakes:
Below is the text of a press release issued by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. following the monthly meeting of its Michigan Economic Growth Authority board at which a number of tax breaks/subsidies were granted to "winner" companies selected by bureaucrats and political appointees. Gov. Granholm attended the board meeting.
The Muskegon Chronicle is reporting a new twist on Michigan's growing corporate welfare empire: The coastal city is offering to give free land to job providers who occupy space in a pair of government-owned industrial parks.
What's interesting is that — at least theoretically — handing out "free land" in moribund cities like Muskegon or Detroit doesn't necessarily constitute any kind of unfair business subsidy or "picking winners and losers." Rather, it could just be a local government seeking a "market-clearing price" for commercial/industrial property, the value of which may be essentially zero anyway.
In his Education Week blog, Rick Hess explains why the the "Edujobs" school bill just passed by Congress will be "harmful, not just wasteful." The bill will dole out $318 million to public school payrolls in Michigan, and $10 billion nationwide.
Hess describes why some lean times might actually provide some benefits to the public school system, or at least to its "customers":
The average teacher salary in the Mona Shores Public Schools was $58,544 in 2009, and employees are not required to contribute anything to health insurance policies that cost the district some $12,800 annually. These are among the highlights in the current collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the district and the local arm of the Michigan Education Association union.
On May 29, Michigan Capitol Confidential reported that Congressman Thad McCotter, R-Livonia, was one of just nine Republicans nationwide to co-sponsor a bill that would bail out multi-employer union pension funds, putting taxpayers "on the hook for $165 billion in unfunded union pension liabilities," according to Americans for Limited Government.
Over the last month, two Michigan union officials pled guilty to federal criminal charges. In one case, UAW members were bilked out of over $200,000. From the Department of Labor, Office of Labor-Management Standards:
On July 20, 2010, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Andrew Blackmon, former President of Steelworkers Local 842 (located in Detroit, Mich.), pled guilty to one count of falsifying union records. On June 18, 2010, Blackmon was charged with the same offense. The plea follows an investigation by the OLMS Detroit District Office.
In a recent radio interview with Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative Director Michael LaFaive, radio host Tony Conley stated that we should be looking at what Texas and North Carolina are doing to foster economic development. Any benchmarking attempt should first start with the right states, but North Carolina isn't one of them.
School spending — an area of expertise for Mackinac Center analysts — continues to dominate the headlines.
A Kalamazoo Gazette story about school district consolidation cites the Center's 2009 school privatization survey, which showed that almost 45 percent of school districts in Michigan were saving money by privatizing non-instructional services. The story also refers to a 2007 study by Andrew Coulson, an adjunct scholar with the Center, which examines consolidation. Coulson found that there is a potential for cost savings for districts based on an optimal size of 2,900 students, but ultimately consolidation would not save enough money to consider it as a serious strategy.
The U.S. Forest Service has issued new regulations regarding guiding and outfitting on national forest lands. If you plan to guide someone in the fall bear season and you have not made application for a permit, you may be out of luck as the application deadline was July 1. The new requirements include a permit fee of between $150 and $600 depending on the number of days of activity. In addition to the permit fee, guides and outfitters must secure a minimum of $500,000 in liability insurance and submit an operation plan. A permit from the Forest Service for guiding and outfitting is required even for a nonprofit operation.
The Senate met one day this week and passed several non-controversial measures with unanimous votes. The House had one session scheduled but there was no quorum and no votes were taken.
Senate Bill 1093, Authorize Army Airborne license plates,
passed in the Senate (34 to 0)
To offer a special license plate to current or former members of the Army
Airborne.
Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey has written open letters to the two main gubernatorial candidates — Virg Bernero and Rick Snyder — in attempt to get clarification of their views on a variety of labor and other issues.
Check back here for their answers.
Michigan's business, labor and regulatory climate must change if the state's economy is going to recover, Mike LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, explained today on "The Tony Conley Show" on WILS 1320AM in Lansing. You can listen to the interview at: http://www.webwiseforradio.com/site_files/368/Media/Tony/lafaive_08_12c.mp3
Michigan Public Radio recently turned to Education Policy Director Mike Van Beek to explain some of the issues surrounding funding for Michigan's public schools, which some seem to constantly claim are underfunded, despite evidence to the contrary.
Van Beek discussed his research on the costs of school health insurance plans, and has also examined some of the common myths about public school funding.
Michigan's share of the loot from the "edujobs" bill passed by Congress this week will be about $310 million. We're told that this will "save" 4,700 teacher jobs in Michigan. That's highly unlikely, for a couple of reasons.
First, most of the "4,700 layoffs" are administrative fictions, as explained here. Second, even if all 4,700 layoffs were real, the new money would divide out to $66,000 per teacher — but the teachers that districts hire back will almost certainly cost more than this.
President Obama, Gov. Granholm and much of the political class are misleading the public by leaving out key information when they say that the $26 billion state budgets bailout bill signed into law yesterday will reverse "thousands of teacher layoffs."
Special interest groups whose members' compensation comes from tax dollars are afraid that Michigan's economic crisis will impact their paychecks. They're right to be concerned since there is less private money left to pay generous public-sector salaries and benefits. Here's a reminder of the compensation gap between the two sectors.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sen. Debbie Stabenow were quick to praise the new "edujobs" bill passed by the House Tuesday as part of a "stimulus II" package (and despite it lacking a legal title). Among other legislation it will dole out $310 million to Michigan public schools, with the hopes of "saving" 4,700 teacher jobs.
A new report by the Michigan League for Human Services bemoans the lack of tax money going to higher education. But the authors give a skewed view of appropriations, get some facts wrong, and completely miss the 800-pound gorilla of higher education: that increasing costs drive tuition increases.
Detroit Free Press columnist Stephen Henderson says Michigan needs the money that will come from the so-called 'edujobs' bill, but the state must also tackle the issue of school spending reform.
"Even more important, we're taking this money to retain teachers (an estimated 4,200) who are still not, on average, contributing near what they should be to their benefits packages," Henderson writes.
A number of pundits here and nationally have pointed to recent primary results as evidence that the Tea Party movement is ineffective or a failure. These analyses are flawed, because they are based on a conventional Republican vs. Democrat electoral politics worldview. This misses the Tea Party’s rejection of the entire ruling class establishment, including the major political parties as currently constituted.
Michigan residents can expect to pay significantly higher energy bills in the future due in large part to state law that requires that 10 percent of electricity sales in the state come from renewable sources, such as wind.
The Institute for Energy Research recently released a report titled "Energy Regulation in the States: A Wake-up Call," that found that states with binding renewable portfolio standards have electricity rates nearly 40 percent higher than states without renewable energy mandates. The higher rates in states with a renewable energy portfolio standard may not be entirely caused by the mandates, although there is a strong cause-and-effect relationship to renewable energy mandates and higher electricity rates.
