Last week, Gov. Jennifer Granholm introduced the final budget of her tenure. She proposes spending $2.1 billion more than the current year, and requests a $554 million net tax increase for fiscal 2011. The tax hike comes from immediately increasing the tax burden on consumers by expanding the sales tax to services, while gradually implementing a reduction in business taxes.
Today marks one year since President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law.
Below is a sampling of what Mackinac Center analysts and scholars have written in the past year about the so-called stimulus bill.
A new study claiming that charter public schools are segregated should be ignored according to comments by Mike Van Beek, the Center's director of education policy, in the Chicago Tribune.
Van Beek easily dissected the flaws in the study. He also writes about charter schools here and here.
Tax breaks, subsidies, credits and other forms of corporate welfare must be addressed in Michigan's fiscal 2011 budget.
The Detroit News editorial today says this issue "has received scant attention from anyone" other than the Mackinac Center.
Here is just a sampling of the work Center analysts have done on this front:
Cutting corporate taxes, not "punitive" actions, are the best way to revive American industry, according to David Littmann, senior economist for the Center.
Littmann told Industry Week magazine that calls from labor for a national industrial policy will result in special interests, not the marketplace, coming out ahead.
"Recently the Mackinac Center using this kind of flawed logic took Governor Granholm to task for saying that Michigan didn't want to become Mississippi. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country, with high poverty rates and low education attainment. The Governor is right. Who wants to be like them? What an awful vision for Michigan: one of the poorest states in the country." Lou Glazer
A few days ago on the Facebook page of one of Michigan's Tea Party leaders (Wendy Day of "Common Sense in Government"), some reader comments were posted revealing confusion regarding the purpose and composition of that movement. I took the opportunity to expand on an answer from the Mackinac Center's "Tea Party Activist Toolbox," as follows:
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Friday spent several minutes talking about the lawsuit filed by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation against the Michigan Department of Human Services over the forced unionization of tens of thousands of home-based day care providers.
Henry Payne, editorial cartoonist for The Detroit News and contributor to The MC, wrote recently at National Review Online about what he sees as the "green indoctrination" of public school students.
CapCon Daily also examined this issue recently.
Dollar figures touted by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in her State of the State address last week came from a study about the supposed benefits of tourism subsidies that is not yet complete.
Gov. Granholm said that the state gets $2.23 back for every dollar it spends on advertising through the "Pure Michigan" campaign. That information came from a report that won't be finished for another month, according to the Livingston Daily Press & Argus.
A new study by the school employee union-sponsored Great Lakes Center for Educational Research and Practice claims charter schools managed by education management organizations are "strongly racial segregative." However, the report's use of the term "segregation" is misleading, and the overall conclusions add little to the debate over charter schools.
The lead editorial in yesterday's Lansing State Journal called for ending post-retirement health care benefits to state retirees of working age: "It's time for the state to stop subsidizing health benefits for former workers who are still of working age . . . In the private sector at least, the clear trend is that if people under age 65 want subsidized health insurance, they should expect to be full-time employees."
At a time when Michigan taxpayers are suffering a 14 percent unemployment rate, furloughs, and job and benefit cuts, Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposed fiscal 2011 state budget blueprint calls for a broadening of service taxes and a 3 percent hike in unionized state employee pay on top of maintaining lavish pension benefits compared to the private sector.
Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Center, was a guest on "The Frank Beckmann Show" on WJR AM760 today, discussing Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposed fiscal 2011 budget. He pointed out several shortcomings in her plan and offered suggestions on what the state should do to reduce costs, lower tax burdens and create a job-friendly atmosphere. You can read more about those items here.
The exodus of young and educated young people from Michigan is one of those “clear, simple and wrong” explanations often cited as a factor in Michigan’s poor economic performance. The reality is that young people are already highly mobile even in a good economy, and that even in Michigan’s ongoing bad times, we're actually doing pretty well in attracting college graduates to the state.
I apologize for taking so long to respond to Ron Gettelfinger’s article in last Thursday’s Detroit News. I have to tell you I’ve really struggled with it. My first response was a six-page rant, but then I came to think that I might have done just as well with a simple “whatever.” ThenI realized I needed to come up with something in between, so I’ll do my best. Just understand there are multiple layers of inanity behind Gettelfinger’s words. Start to pry beneath any of it and you risk hours of frantically trying to document the stuff he gets wrong only to realize you’re just scratching the surface.
Fox News aired a segment by John Stossel titled "Whose Business is it Anyway?" Thursday afternoon on "Shepard Smith's Studio B," about the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Human Services over the forced unionization of home-based day care providers. MCLF Director Patrick J. Wright was interviewed for the taped piece.
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm introduced a series of tax hikes today to raise more revenue to cover its overspending. But adding a tax hike would increase the revenue to a system that's already giving Lansing more revenue than typical among states.
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm presented her executive budget today. In it, she argues that Michigan needs to raise taxes in the over the next few years because its revenues are far below its constitutional revenue limit. She states, "The gap has grown as a result of the economic downturn and is anticipated to widen further as currently enacted tax changes take effect in the next several years."
Former Libertarian Senate candidate and party chairman Michael Corliss is apparently confused by my recent commentary on the Michigan Education Association and its efforts to scuttle reform proposals passed by the state Legislature, so much so that he thinks he’s in “Bizarro World.” The confusion is understandable — politics does sometimes make for odd sleeping arrangements — but Corliss, an MEA member, misses the main point and in the process makes the very political and very leftish MEA into some sort of free-market, small-government ally, which is truly bizarre.
In her State of the State address last week, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm listed the reasons why she believes the state's economy has fallen. "We all know the reasons — trade policies that dismantled factories here and built them in Mexico, the auto industry in meltdown, the banking crisis, the mortgage crisis, and on top of all that, a severe national recession." While the latter reasons may have played their part, company and job relocation to Mexico has been the least of Michigan's problems. Furthermore, trade with Mexico has actually been a bright spot for the state.
Wesley Reynolds, Mackinac Center operations intern, writes about President William Henry Harrison to commemorate the 237th anniversary of his birth at Landmarks of Liberty.
Members of a panel discussion on WXYZ TV's "Spotlight on the News" program agreed that Gov. Jennifer Granholm's final State of the State address last week was well-delivered, but lacked substance.
Ken Braun, managing editor of Capitol Confidential Daily, said less emphasis should be put on the annual address because it doesn't contain budget information. The governor's budget proposal, due Feb. 12, is where the focus belongs, he said.
The following is a lightly edited excerpt from an e-mail recently sent to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy by a front-line worker in the state's welfare department:
"... [Meanwhile,] we employees have sacrificed pensions, furlough days, raises, health benefit deductibles, layoffs, early retirements and mental health for sake of the State, but the hole just gets bigger. Now they want to cut the retiree benefits? ... This should be the time when the Baby Boomers are uniting to heal the nation; instead, we are a flood of forgotten voices who have allowed our generation to be passed over."
Is Detroit’s economic plight a bellwether for the nation? “Detroitification,” a phrase coined by my colleague, Jack McHugh, is defined as the hollowing out of the private economy to prop up unsustainable (and often unresponsive) government establishments. Is this an apt description of Washington’s policies?
