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.
In 2015 I was graciously invited to testify before a Minnesota state committee on taxes regarding an automatic tax inflator for cigarettes. The invitation was a result of my decade long investigation — in partnership with professor and economist Todd Nesbit — of cigarette excise taxes and their impact on illicit activity, most notably tax evasion. I told the committee what it apparently did not want to hear: that their recent tax increase and associated tax inflator would lead to rampant smuggling.
Lawmakers agreed on July 12 to deliver $200 million of taxpayer dollars to businesses selected by politicians, an idea the governor is expected to sign into law. This gift is a waste of money. Ostensibly, it is to create jobs, but it won’t work and creates an unfair playing field.
The Legislature met for one day this week, for the purpose of authorizing a new round of state subsidies for certain corporations. The next session day is scheduled for Aug. 16.
Senate Bill 242, Authorize giving state revenue to a few particular corporations: Passed 71 to 35 in the House
Great power and funding entail great responsibility. This principle needs broader application to Michigan’s 56 intermediate school districts, which wield big budgets but tend to operate outside the limelight.
ISDs have grown responsible for a steadily larger share of the state’s public school finances, though most are run by boards that aren’t democratically elected. These education agencies combined spent more than $1.6 billion in 2015-16, nearly 10 percent of all K-12 current operating expenditures. Yet these agencies serve less than 1 percent of the state’s public school students directly.
State lawmakers are considering a new package of legislation that would provide fiscal favors to companies selected by Lansing bureaucrats for special treatment. Among the arguments made in favor of the program is that it is costless because without the incentive the jobs wouldn’t be created in the first place. In other words, it’s performance-based.
Gov. Rick Snyder is hoping that a package of corporate handout bills already passed by the state Senate (Senate Bills 242-244) will likewise be adopted by the House as early as next week. The proposal reads a lot like the old, failed Michigan Economic Growth Authority that cost taxpayers billions of dollars with little to show, at the expense of perhaps more wisely funded programs.
By Jason Hayes
After President Trump’s decision in June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, various environmental groups, celebrities and politicians engaged in a string of hysterical condemnations. Former President Barack Obama characterized the decision as an “absence of American leadership,” while former Vice President Al Gore called it “reckless and indefensible.”
The people who live in the outer ring of Detroit suburbs, especially areas like Lapeer and northern St. Clair County, have the longest drives to work in Michigan.
The Grand Rapids area does not see as long of commutes on average, though there are some areas in Newaygo County where people make longer commutes.
