Just one day after the 236th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Michigan legislators are preparing to divert a portion of today's sales tax revenue to provide a permanent subsidy for a particular group of business owners, Michigan's tourism industry.
A Detroit News headline today claims that "lax home-school laws" are to blame for a young girl's death by parental neglect. This was indeed a tragic event, and people are right to seek ways to prevent such abuse. Putting heavier regulations on home-schoolers, however, would not solve the problem of abuse.
Gentle Reader,
Yesterday’s Detroit News ran an Op-Ed by AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney on the subject of Public Act 312, which specifies that binding arbitration be used to resolve bargaining impasses between local governments in Michigan and unions representing police and firefighters. Gaffney’s argument in defense of the current law is so thoroughly riddled with evasions and misstatements that a point-by-point rebuttal is in order. For sake of clarity I have reproduced Mr. Gaffney’s article in italics. My comments are in bold.
In studies and blog posts, this author and others have argued that state "jobs" programs are really political development programs used by term limited legislators to advance their own political careerism by handing out special tax favors and subsidies to select corporate "winners," all under the guise of "economic development."
The state Legislature was busy patting itself on the back last week for its full-fledged assault on property rights, voting to ban smoking in privately owned properties such as restaurants and bars. How ironic that it would do so while actively subsidizing a film industry that encourages smoking.
Throwing money at Detroit only diverts leadership from its core problems.
That's the upshot of Kathy Hoekstra's superb report Wednesday about the latest round of taxpayer millions aimed at "fixing" Michigan's largest urban eyesore. Hoekstra's gumshoe work tracks whether the $47 million in federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program monies targeted to stem foreclosures and stabilize housing values has been wasted. The camera tells the tale.
With Detroit Public Schools spending more than $14,000 per student, one would expect there would be some learning going on, even after adjusting for the inefficiencies one usually finds in a government operation and further accounting for the particularly high levels of corruption and incompetence associated with government in Detroit. Yet recent math scores for Detroit students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are only slightly better than what one would expect for children who had received no instruction in math at all and were guessing at all the questions. The district is begging for volunteers to tutor Detroit school kids in reading — which doesn’t bode well for the reading results when they come out.
Amidst economic devastation, mass out-migration, failing public schools and battered roads, Michigan's Legislature has seen fit to hold hearings and discussions on ... the official state tartan of Michigan.
Now, my first reaction is that, with what the Michigan government has recently churned out — special favors to certain companies and unions, more regulations and high taxes — I'm glad the Legislature is occupying itself with something so innocuous. But the irony of a burdensome state government codifying a particular plaid is too much to handle. The Scottish, after all, do not tend to favor or trust big government.
I have to hand it to the Michigan Department of State Police and its Freedom of Information Act division. Not only did they want nearly $7 million ($6,876,303.90, to be exact) to process my FOIA request, but they now seem to be dragging their feet in explaining how they arrived at what is recorded on Sunshine Review as the nation's highest FOIA fee.
On Page 13 in the current issue of Michigan Capitol Confidential (November/December 2009), a roll call vote accompanying the article "Balancing Act" was not labeled properly.
The article describes a vote in the Legislature to reduce K-12 spending by less than 3 percent. The Michiganvotes.org roll call description of how lawmakers voted identifies correctly those lawmakers who were not willing to make this cut by using a title that says "Lawmakers who voted AGAINST a cut of less than 3 percent to the K-12 school aid payments..."
On Aug. 5, 2009, Sen. Jason Allen, R-Traverse City, introduced Senate Bill 731, which would give statutory cover to a scheme transferring approximately $6.6 million in taxpayer money annually to the SEIU government employee union, one of the parents of ACORN. This is accomplished by creating a shell government "employer" for some 42,000 individuals who are actually hired by elderly or disabled Medicaid recipients to provide personal care services in their homes. A Mackinac Center lawsuit is pending regarding a similar arrangement imposed on home day care providers.
The Green Schools Bill (Senate Bill 904) was passed 37-0 by the Michigan Senate Dec. 10, 2009. While students at public schools in the state chronically underperform (Detroit Public Schools students performing the worst in the nation), the Michigan Senate has concluded that it is a priority for students to be encouraged to spend more time on politically correct green activities.
The Michigan Economic Growth Authority is the state's premiere economic incentive program and accounts for much of the state's "job creation" announcements.
But most of the job gains and losses in the state are unheralded. Consider this chart of quarterly job gains, losses and MEGA announcements.
Last week, I commented here that political careerism is at the root of a massive expansion of Michigan's corporate welfare empire. Politicians seeking to remain on the government payroll for the rest of their working lives — including 148 term-limited legislators — are eager to create ever more boards, authorities, agencies, etc., empowered to hand out special favors to particular corporations and industries.
A recent commentary by Michael Van Beek, education policy director, was cited Sunday in a Bay City Times story about school cuts across Bay County.
While school officials told The Times the problem is due to school funding, Van Beek pointed out that is not true, explaining it's an issue of expenses. His piece, titled "The Source of the School Budget Quagmire," shows that school funding - when adjusted for inflation - has increased $3,000 per student since the passage of Proposal A.
One of the methods historians use to discover the social or other problems of past eras is to examine the laws that were proposed at a particular time. So for example, if Charlemagne promulgated a law prohibiting knights from killing rich widows and taking their land, we can infer that there was a whole lotta widow-killing going on back then.
From MichiganVotes.org:
2009 House Bill 5626 (Raise cap on Detroit deficit finance debt)
The case for a global warming scientific "consensus" may be crumbling, and with it the clear and present "emergency" that requires a massive reordering of the world's economy, including slower economic growth for the United States and the rest of the developed world.
The threat of corruption is a widely recognized downside of enacting cap-and-trade legislation, which was passed by the U.S. House and currently is being considered in the U.S. Senate. Soft corruption is inevitable under cap-and-trade, but instead of money being exchanged under the table, however, the government doles out carbon emission allowances worth billions of dollars to favored political constituents.
In a recent Grand Rapids Press column, Lou Glazer argued that there's a correlation between a state getting more college graduates and enjoying higher statewide income levels.
However, Glazer uses only snapshot views of what the per capita personal income or economic output is in a state right now. He ignores trends. But you can't just wear a white suit to become Mark Twain, you have to grow to the role.
A report at AnnArbor.com indicates an increase in the number of hotel room rentals in the Ann Arbor area and credits the Michigan film subsidy, but the story fails to mention any impact on hotels - or other businesses - throughout the rest of Michigan that pay taxes to fund the subsidy.
Gongwer reports that Michigan's House Education Committee approved a charter school expansion bill Thursday, introduced by Sen. Buzz Thomas, D-Detroit, but only after shackling it with some debilitating amendments.
The amendment limiting the bill's promise most severely came from Rep. Jennifer Haase, D-Richmond, which mandates that all new "schools of excellence" must exist in districts with graduation rates lower than 60 percent. According to 2008 data from the state's Center for Educational Performance and Information, only 37 districts would qualify to host these new charter public schools. That's just 7 percent of all of the districts in Michigan.
A Detroit Free Press story today on school district consolidation cites a Mackinac Center study on the issue from 2007.
Andrew Coulson in "School District Consolidation, Size and Spending: an Evaluation" says that while consolidating smaller districts could save $31 million, breaking up excessively larger districts could save about 12 times as much.
Following news of Detroit Public Schools scoring record lows on a national test, an editorial in The Detroit News recommends following the lead of Washington, D.C., which adopted a mayoral control system. The editorial cites the effective control that resulted as the recipe for success. Unfortunately, The News bypassed the most effective reform in the nation's capital: The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program (use the scroll bar to select "District of Columbia").
Russ Harding took to the New York Times last month to describe yet more reasons why taxpayers in Michigan and across the nation should stop letting politicians get away with the great ethanol scam. Might reason be finally breaking through?
Evidence: Yesterday, a committee in the Michigan House considered HB 5042, which MichiganVotes.org says would "require that half the light trucks and all the cars the state purchases after 2009 be 'alternative energy' vehicles. There would be a preference that the trucks not be E-85 ethanol burners."
