Alabama Congressman Parker Griffith's announcement yesterday that he was defecting from the Democrats and joining the Republicans has left political pundits and partisan professionals alike pondering the impact this will have on the 2010 election. With some justification, non-political actors in the nation's Tea Party movement will also see in this some vindication for the pressure that they have been applying to politicians over the last year. But it's very easy to draw the wrong lessons from the Griffith story. What it really demonstrates is something much more important than who controls Congress and your health care.
Michigan schools once again are said to be facing a "funding crisis," and the most suggested solution boils down to rounding up more revenue to feed them. The only problem with this simplistic solution is: It. Won't. Work. And here's why:
In a 2005 Michigan School Business Officials press release about the fiscal outlook for the coming year, Executive Director Tom White described how schools have slimmed down their budgets: "Schools have moved past the fat and are down to the bone." Also in the statement: 79 percent of districts said they expected to spend down their fund balance, 63 percent predicted class sizes would increase and 65 percent said they'd cut spending on supplies and services.
Census Bureau figures released today continue to confirm the damaging impact of bad public policy on Michigan this decade.
An Op-Ed on this issue by Michael LaFaive, director of the Center's Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, and Michael Hicks, an adjunct scholar with the Center and director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, was posted immediately online today by The Detroit News.
It must be Christmas with all the presents floating around.
The health care bill just cleared its first hurdle through the Senate and the amount of special favors and outright bribes for powerful senators and swing states is (expectedly) outrageous.
The most egregious are as follows:
"The MEGA program has brought the kind of leadership and decisive action that will make Southwest Michigan First and the Kalamazoo area a hotbed for job creation." — [Then] SMF chief Barry Broome referring to the Michigan Economic Growth Authority's 2000 decision to award American Greetings a MEGA tax credit deal.
Editor’s note: This piece was updated in 2015 to add a 2001 forecast by [then] MEDC CEO Doug Rothwell.
This week Michigan Economic Development Corp. CEO Greg Main predicted for Michigan Radio News that this state will experience job growth in 2010. He also told West Michigan Business Report that "Michigan appears to be on the edge of coming out of this recession. We're starting to see some climbing out. I think we're going to see some pretty strong growth within the next year." University of Michigan economists (who have a history of flawed crystal-ball gazing themselves) suggest otherwise, believing that none will occur until the year after.
By Jack McHugh
On Dec. 18 the Michigan House voted on party lines to defeat a measure prohibiting state environmental regulators from basing electric generating plant permit decisions on factors other than ones related to pollution, such as whether they think the state really needs the plant, or the owner should look for alternative forms of electricity. The issue arose due to Granholm Administration efforts in the past year to throw roadblocks in front of new coal-fired power plants, including a $2 billion facility in Bay County.
Here's the latest evidence that so-called "economic development" programs are actually nothing more than political development programs: It appears that the state's incentive apparatus has now been enlisted to raise the political profile of Michigan's Lt. Gov. John Cherry, the Democratic heir apparent to replace Gov. Jennifer Granholm when she is termed-out of office at the end of 2010.
Now that the Michigan Legislature finally passed some school reform bills in its attempt to get a potential one-time payment of $400 million from the federal government, let's put this "Race to the Top" program into perspective.
Four hundred million dollars seems like a nice chunk of change; that is, until you consider how much Michigan spends on its public schools. In 2007-08, Michigan spent almost $19 billion on public education, making the potential "Race to the Top" money a mere 2 percent of the state's total education bill.
Michigan's public school funding continues to draw attention.
Michael Van Beek, director of education policy, wrote in the Dec. 18 Dearborn Times-Herald that despite relatively small per-pupil funding cuts this year, Proposal A has increased school funding about 33 percent. Van Beek argues that controlling costs, not receiving more revenues, will help schools deal best with budget issues.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation is awaiting the next step in its lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Human Services.
The case, the first filed by the newly created public-interest law firm, seeks to prevent the state and two unions from siphoning off nearly $4 million in "dues" from subsidy checks that home-based day care operators receive when they care for the children of low-income parents.
New state-by-state unemployment figures released today showed that Michigan remains the state with the highest unemployment rate for the 45th consecutive month. But overall, its rate decreased along with 35 other states.
Interestingly enough, the number of payroll jobs in Michigan fell even though the number for household employment (a factor in the unemployment rate calculations) increased. These numbers generally move pretty closely together, but there are a lot more jobs in the household survey than the establishment survey. Conceptually, the establishment survey doesn't cover self-employment, so that could be a reason. The second could be that people are ditching their second job, which would cover a loss in the establishment survey but not the household survey. (More information on the differences between the surveys is here.)
Today, the Michigan Legislature will likely wrap up its work for 2009. As has been noted on this page over the last couple of weeks, end-of-the-year work by state lawmakers often carries all of the thought and responsibility of a New Year's Eve drinking binge, but it's the taxpayers of Michigan who get left nursing the hangover. And, much like the New Year's Eve drunk, politicians often have a short memory for what caused the headache in the first place.
A recent Detroit News article, inappropriately titled "Lax home-school laws put kids at risk," states that current Michigan law prevents us from finding out how well home-schooled students are doing academically. Home-schoolers in Michigan aren't required to take standardized tests, as they do in other states, but Michigan home-schoolers sometimes take them voluntarily. The results from these tests are very impressive.
An Op-Ed in the Journal Newspapers by Tom Watkins, former state superintendent of public instruction, cites the Mackinac Center as one of several groups that have made suggestions about how Michigan can address school funding matters.
Here is a new resource that Michael Van Beek, director of education policy, put together to help people better understand the issue.
For those of you not familiar with the acronym in the title, MDFER stands for Michigan Democrats for Education Reform. We welcome them to Michigan with their new director, Harrison Blackmond. Mr. Blackmond previously served as the president for Detroit's chapter of the Black Alliance for Education Options and has been a contributor to Michigan Education Report, published by the Mackinac Center.
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.
