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."
Despite its myriad problems, Michigan is a place of "opportunity," David Littmann, the Center's senior economist, tells The Washington Examiner today.
J.P. Freire, associate editorial page editor at the paper, references in his column several of the problems Michigan faces that the Center has been commenting on for years, including high-cost government employee benefits, high unemployment, population loss and increased taxes.
It's often repeated in the halls of government and the state-focused media that Michigan "underinvests" in higher education. The facts suggest otherwise.
In 2003, Michigan had the seventh highest spending among the states on public universities. Appropriations here have been fairly level since then, but we were still the 10th-biggest higher ed spender in 2008. Even with sideways revenues for half the decade, Michigan has been surpassed only by Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia in total dollars devoted to higher education.
According to the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, at least 58 separate types of "economic development" entities or programs are currently operating in Michigan.[*] The scope of this activity is broad and includes grants; discriminatory tax breaks; direct and indirect subsidies; subsidized loans and loan guarantees; financing authorities; "enterprise zones" and "incubators"; job training programs; and more. Probably a majority of Michigan's 1,859 local governments participate to some degree, plus most or all state universities and community colleges.
Carbon dioxide became public enemy No. 1 Monday when the Environmental Protection Agency made an endangerment finding declaring that CO2 is a harmful pollutant that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This is the EPA's Christmas present to President Barack Obama as he prepares to jet to Copenhagen with a mostly empty toy bag to discuss climate change. The president had hoped to bring with him to Copenhagen a signed cap-and-trade bill; the prospect of that happening in the near future looks increasingly dim. The more the American people learn about the high costs of such legislation and the near zero environmental gain, the less support there is for the seriously flawed policy.
The Michigan Legislature is once again considering an attack on private property rights in the form of a workplace smoking ban, according to the Associated Press.
Russ Harding, director of the Center's Property Rights Network, addressed the issue a year ago when the Michigan House and Senate passed separate bills but failed to reach an agreement on how intrusive to make the proposed legislation:
David Littmann, the Mackinac Center's senior economist, is sticking by his prediction that Michigan's unemployment rate will hit 17 to 20 percent, according to Reporting Michigan.
Littmann originally said in May that the state jobless rate would go that high by the end of the calendar year. Michigan's unemployment now stands at just over 15 percent, with final figures yet to be reported. Reporting Michigan said that Gov. Jennifer Granholm claimed the state's unemployment rate would go no higher than just over 13 percent in 2009, based on predictions by University of Michigan economists.
Two Op-Eds by Center scholars recently appeared in the Dearborn Times-Herald.
Russ Harding, senior environmental analyst, wrote about problems with biofuels, such as ethanol, and why the federal government should end subsidies for them. Harding pointed out three specific problems with the push for ethanol, including the problems the blend causes in engines, the environmental impact of ethanol production and the increased food prices it causes among the world's poorest people. Harding's piece originally appeared in The New York Times.
Michigan is not officially part of the two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which the New York Post says aims to "save the Earth from certain doom." While the Great Lakes state will miss out on hobnobbing with notable personalities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles, Michigan seems poised to do its part by legislatively chipping away at 54 policy recommendations to "reduce greenhouse gases" as spelled out by the Michigan Climate Action Council in the 125-page Michigan Climate Action Plan and its 471-page appendix.
One can’t help but feel a little bit of sympathy for Detroit public school teachers as they contemplate a contract in which they will be effectively loaning the DPS up to $10,000 apiece next year in the form of $500 monthly reductions in their pay. The plan is for the district to use these funds to pay off $219 million in debts. Hopefully the funds will be repaid (without interest) once the financial crisis subsides.
