Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Traverse City Record-Eagle on February 11, 2024.
Despite no independent evidence of their success, film production subsidies are once again on the docket in Lansing. House bills 4907 and 4908, championed by northern Michigan Rep. John Roth, would create a tax credit for up to 30% of production expenses. The company that qualifies for the credit could then sell it at a discount to another.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to take $670 million out of the state’s pension debt payments and spend it elsewhere. Michigan legislators should be careful. Underfunded pension debts have a long history of wreaking havoc with state budgets. Lawmakers, employees, unions and citizens should all want to catch up on what taxpayers owe to public retirees.
By Molly Macek
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reiterated her plan to continue expanding taxpayer-paid preschool to all four-year-olds in her State of the State address and budget proposal last week. But her PreK for All plan will do nothing more than subsidize preschool for wealthier families. It’s a waste of time and money for the state to pay the bills of people who don’t need help.
The Growing Michigan Together Council, a task force Gov. Gretchen Whitmer charged with drafting recommendations to reverse Michigan’s population decline, suggests normalizing the concept of super-seniors at the high school level.
Super-seniors are college students who stretch four years of a baccalaureate degree over five or six.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is calling for “free” community college for all Michigan students. But this proposal is very unlikely to be worth the increased expense to taxpayers. Taxpayer funding for community college is already skyrocketing, but the number of students attending community colleges in Michigan has plummeted. At the same time, the number of those graduating or continuing to other schools is alarmingly low.
Elected officials feel they need to show they’re doing something about jobs, and what could be a bigger spectacle than a Hollywood crew shooting a new film in their state? There has been a proliferation of states offering to pay large parts of a film production’s expenses with taxpayer dollars. And there is also an ideologically diverse group of people — including the Mackinac Center — who think that’s a waste of money. I speak with Jacob Whiton and Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First about our opposition to film subsidies.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recommends that legislators approve her proposed HIRE program, which would give select companies taxpayer money. In her pitch, she confuses taxpayer subsidies for saving companies money. “The more you hire, the more you should save in Michigan,” she says.
Only the government would use taxpayer money to pretend to solve a problem rather than actually solving it at no financial cost. This is how Michigan makes housing law.
The state could use more housing. While Michigan’s overall population is stagnant, the number of actual households increased by 200,000 in the past decade. The Great Lakes State is also a popular tourist destination and place for people to have second homes. The Michigan State Housing Development Authority says we need 190,000 more housing units just to “curb a crisis.”
Michigan has received a “special dishonorable mention” from a prominent watchdog group for its plans to spend more than $1.5 billion in federal taxpayer money on broadband deployment and adoption programs. These funds from the 2021 federal infrastructure bill are being distributed to the state through the National Technology and Information Administration’s Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program and will be administered in the state by the Michigan High-Speed Internet Office.
Michigan lawmakers earmarked $225 million for the state’s 21st Century Jobs Fund over the next three years. This is the same fund that Gov. Granholm said would blow us away. This law has been added to the Mackinac Center’s business subsidy scorecard.
The 21st Century Jobs Fund has been used for over a dozen different programs since it began. Most of the money is gone and few jobs flowed from the state’s efforts. One assessment found that the programs the fund supported cost taxpayers between $274,800 and $330,600 per job, hardly a good deal for taxpayers. Plus, the state has continued to obfuscate what was spent and what the state got in return for its spending.
A large percentage of Michigan residents are barely scraping by, according to multiple news reports. MLive says 56% of households in Kalamazoo can’t survive. CBS explains that 40% of Michiganders are “financially insecure.” An NPR affiliate says four in ten Michigan residents don’t make enough “to pay for the basics.”
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in The Messenger in January 2024.
Whatever the U.S. Constitution may say about separation of powers, America today is a land of nearly unlimited executive authority. While we associate unitary power with the modern imperial presidency, state governors are happy to join in, as many did with broad COVID-era fiats.
By Molly Macek
More than 60 students, educators and policymakers from across Michigan braved winter weather last week to celebrate National School Choice Week at the state Capitol. This annual event to raise awareness about the many education options in the Great Lakes State was sponsored by the Mackinac Center, Parent Advocates for Choice in Education, the Great Lakes Education Project and other key partners in the education freedom movement.
Democratic political leaders are using a tragic event — which may have little or nothing to do with homeschooling — to call for more regulations of families teaching their own children. They claim that forcing homeschool parents to register with the state will protect kids, but no one has explained how that would work.
By Jason Hayes
This article originally appeared in National Review December 4, 2023.
Michigan is the latest state to embrace the self-destructive idea that it can completely wean itself from traditional energy sources. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed two laws on November 28 that all but ensure the state will replace its reliable sources of electricity production with unreliable ones such as wind and solar. The result, according to a new Mackinac Center analysis, will be skyrocketing utility bills and days-long blackouts in the depths of winter.
People largely purchase new cars and trucks through established auto dealers. These dealers are protected by state laws that prohibit direct sales from automakers. But electric vehicle manufacturers have been trying to change this. A coalition of free-market, environmentalist and consumer advocate groups support them. Dan Crane is the Richard W. Pogue Professor at Law at the University of Michigan and has been working to improve these laws. Michael Van Beek speaks with him for the Overton Window podcast.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News December 27. 2023.
Members of the Growing Michigan Together council seem to agree that the state needs to spend more money to grow the state's population.
But they’re only debating whether the state needs to raise taxes to do it. The council has given little attention to improving existing public services, which is odd coming from a group that views government as vitally important, even to population growth.
State Rep. David Martin introduced legislation last week to roll back Michigan’s income tax rate from 4.25% to 3.9%. This proposal would help households deal with the soaring cost of living and spur job growth. But most importantly, the 3.9% rate would deliver on a promise made to taxpayers almost 20 years ago. Michigan taxpayers deserve a tax cut.
This article originally appeared in The American Spectator November 20, 2023.
If you build mass transit, they will come. That “Field of Dreams” thinking is one of the operating assumptions behind the unprecedented federal and state spending spree on public transportation. The Biden administration is doling out as much as $108 billion on mass transit, while states are planning enormous new projects of all kinds. As a working group established by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently put it, “Public transit is a must have to attract and retain younger residents.”
By Jason Hayes
Rolling blackouts in the Aloha State presage things to come in Michigan.
Michigan’s new net-zero and “100% clean energy” policies mirror Hawaii’s “goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045.” These energy plans are causing both states to rely on more weather-dependent wind and solar, which means that reliability issues are becoming more pronounced.
Most of the ideas from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s population growth council report are either bad, ineffective or have little to do with population growth. But give credit where it is due: The council did have some good ideas on labor regulation laws.
The council recommended making it easier for people to come to Michigan and more likely to want to move here. It called for lawmakers to “conduct a full review of professional licensing requirements to identify which can be maintained, improved, updated or eliminated.” Lawmakers, the report said, should “remove unnecessary bureaucratic barriers to workforce entry without sacrificing workplace/consumer safety or the quality of work provided to Michiganders.”
The Biden administration is pushing extremely costly policies that encourage the adoption of Low Carbon Fuel Standards and force the production of electric vehicles under the guise of reducing carbon emissions. However, these measures would have a very small impact on emissions. Rather than improving the capabilities and efficiency of vehicles on our roads, these measures empty Americans’ pockets and upend consumer choice.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has pledged to do something about the costs that Michigan residents face. What she’s done doesn’t fit her comments, though. The governor hands out favors to some people and does nothing but raise taxes on everyone else.
Lawmakers approved $4.1 billion in selective business subsidies last year alone. That’s taking money from everyone to hand out to big corporations. The handouts are a response to the siren song all politicians hear that they need to do something about jobs. Instead of improving the business climate, they write checks to big business. It never works. The fastest-growing states aren’t the ones writing the biggest checks.
Brian Riedl has been trying to get the United States government to avoid catastrophic levels of debt for more than two decades. On this week’s Overton Window podcast, I speak with Reidl about his work on budget issues as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He’s got a lot to say.
This article originally appeared in Fox News November 30 2023.
What good is a right if you don’t know you have it? What if you know about your right but are blocked from exercising it?
That’s the situation for millions of public workers. They have a constitutional right not to pay dues to government labor unions, yet unions are furiously trying to prevent workers from realizing it. The Supreme Court will decide any day whether to hear a case from Alaska that would ensure that all of America’s nearly 15 million teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public workers have the information and opportunity they need to exercise their fundamental rights.
