There are 540 public school districts in Michigan and we contact each of them every summer to find out whether they contract out for food, custodial or transportation services. This effort has shown that there has been a drastic increase in the practice since 2001 when we first surveyed districts. Today, 71.5 percent of districts report contracting out for at least one of these three noninstructional services.
Last Thursday night the Wisconsin Assembly passed a $3 billion subsidy package for Foxconn, a multinational corporation famous for manufacturing Apple’s iPhone, among other items. The subsidy, Republican leaders and others said, was needed to ensure the corporation would choose Wisconsin for a new manufacturing facility.
It’s well known that talk comes cheap to politicians the world over. In Lansing, even legislators’ written and published ideals are tossed aside for Michigan’s richest men — billionaire Dan Gilbert as one example — or some multinational corporation — like Foxconn of Taiwan as another. Lansing politicians still make sure the superrich get to play by different rules than everyone else.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published in The Oklahoman on August 25, 2017.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court has declared the state's new $1.50-per-pack fee on cigarettes to be unconstitutional. This means a special session could be in the offing to pass a new cigarette tax of equal measure. Any debate must consider whether the attendant lawlessness the higher tax would inspire — including widespread smuggling — would undermine its health goals.
By Jack McHugh
The Legislature continues a summer break with no sessions scheduled until Sept. 6. The House and Senate convened pro-forma sessions one day this week in which no business or roll calls took place. So rather than votes this report contains some interesting or noteworthy bills introduced during the first half of the year.
In Michigan, the dues skim against home-based day care providers like Mackinac Center Legal Foundation clients Sherry Loar, Michelle Berry and Paulette Silverson ended in 2011. A similar skim against home health caregivers like Foundation clients Patricia and Robert Haynes ended in 2013 but only after surviving a 2012 attempt by the Service Employee International Union to constitutionalize the skim.
State lawmakers passed two programs this year to give the businesses they select taxpayer dollars. It’s the kind of policy that tells regular people that they don’t matter while the important people get to play by their own rules.
Our laws are supposed to set the guidelines for everyone to follow. These programs, by contrast, give the favored few an advantage. This is disrespectful to the people that have to pay for those favors.
By Ben DeGrow
An increasing number of school districts want to open their doors to students in August. This growing demand provides further justification for ending the requirement that districts ask state bureaucrats for permission to start the academic year before Labor Day.
By Jason Hayes
On Aug. 1, the state of Michigan posted its Great Lakes Invasive Carp challenge on the Innocentive.com website. The announcement began:
The State of Michigan has appropriated 1 million dollars for a Challenge seeking to prevent the movement of invasive carp species into Lake Michigan from the Illinois River through the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS). The Seeker is looking for new and novel ideas to function independently or in conjunction with those deterrents already in place to prevent carp movement into the Great Lakes or other locations.
Michigan high school students can spend part of their day in work training programs, often earning credits from community colleges. This is a win for schools — who may not have the resources to offer these opportunities — and a win for students — who get trained in a skill they enjoy and earn college credit at no cost to themselves.
What if lawmakers didn't have to travel to Lansing at all? What if they could just vote from home? That's the type of transformational change Mackinac Center CEO Joe Lehman suggested in an interview on the MIRS podcast on Monday, August 7, 2017.
By Ben DeGrow
By Jack McHugh
The Legislature is on a summer break with no sessions scheduled until Aug. 16. Rather than votes this report contains some interesting or noteworthy bills introduced during the first half of the year.
Various Bills: Restrict opioid painkiller prescription quantities
There is a massive turnover of jobs that goes on without politicians having much say or influence.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Michigan added 825,800 jobs in 2016 and lost 779,810 jobs. That is the equivalent of adding and losing roughly one out of every five jobs in just a single year.
By Jack McHugh
The Legislature is on a summer break with no sessions scheduled until Aug. 16. Rather than votes this report contains some interesting or noteworthy legislative proposals to amend the constitution. To become law these require a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and approval by voters.
There is a well-established pension funding principle that was missing from the recently published report of the Responsible Retirement Reform for Local Government Task Force. The principle is that governments should pay for the promises they make to employees as they make them. This means that governments should set aside enough money each year to cover the full costs of the pension benefits earned by their employees that year. This prevents pension debt from growing out of control.
President Trump’s secretary of labor, Alexander Acosta, called for states to reform their occupational licensing rules to encourage job creation. The Obama administration had also previously called for major reforms.
In a speech, Acosta spoke about the importance of the issue:
By Ben DeGrow
The Detroit Free Press reports that hundreds of demonstrators came out on Saturday, July 22, to call for more school funding. They rallied under the nondescript banner of the March for Public Education, a coordinated national effort in at least 16 different cities.
The Trump administration is gearing up to expand federal forfeitures, a law enforcement tool that enables the government to confiscate people’s property before they are convicted of a crime.
Policy Analyst Jarrett Skorup writes in Forbes that this is a bad move:
(Editor’s note: The following is taken from a letter written to supporters of the Mackinac Center.)
The governor who once called corporate welfare “the heroin drip of state government” now seems ready to countenance a full-scale opioid crisis of sweetheart deals for big companies.
By Jack McHugh
The Legislature is on a summer break with no sessions scheduled until Aug. 16. Rather than votes this report contains some interesting or noteworthy legislative proposals to amend the constitution. To become law these require a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and approval by voters.
Local government retiree liabilities in Michigan have grown to at least $17 billion. Retirement debt costs are the fastest-rising expense for many municipalities, crowding out spending on core government services and have led to higher taxes.
Gov. Rick Snyder created a task force early this year that produced a new report. There is agreement that local debt is a problem, but there was little consensus from the task force on how to fix it. Union representatives seem to think this problem can be solved simply by getting more revenue from the state or by raising taxes. Local government groups similarly see tax hikes as a solution to the problem and want the power to more easily raise taxes.
The passage of the 2017 public school pension reform is a transformational change for Michigan. The new reform places Michigan at the forefront of states that have gotten a grip on out-of-control government employee legacy costs.
Michigan had accidentally made school employees its largest creditors and this imposed huge costs on taxpayers. The new law limits that damage by making it much harder for lawmakers and state officials to promise pension benefits to new school employees and then push the costs onto tomorrow’s taxpayers.
Hardly a week goes by when we don’t see an article or news story about America’s crumbling infrastructure and utilities. Contractors say it’s bad and getting worse; so do engineers, universities and think tanks. People experience it too, driving on bad roads, dealing with water main breaks and unreliable utilities. And it upsets nearly everyone to see America’s infrastructure falling apart.
By Kahryn Riley
It’s common to have a conversation about criminal justice reform that includes an anxious reference to the “mass incarceration crisis.” But as legal academic John Pfaff points out in his new book “Locked In,” the phrase might actually be meaningless because we don’t know the right number of offenders to incarcerate. For instance, there are 43,000 people occupying Michigan prisons right now. Is that “mass incarceration?” If so, what is “normal incarceration” and how do we get there? There’s no clear answer to these questions, but here’s how to approach the issue.
