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James Hohman
Few people can claim to have been with the same employer for more than 20 years, especially when they’re in their 30s. But James Hohman, the Mackinac Center’s director of fiscal policy, can.
“I was a freshman at Northwood University taking the class ‘Philosophy of American Life and Business’ with professor Dale Haywood when Michael LaFaive of the Mackinac Center reached out, looking for an intern,” James says. “Shortly after, I started volunteering.”
That was fall 2002. James stayed as an intern, coming on full time after he graduated. “Eventually, they started paying me,” he says.
James grew up in Monroe, Michigan, in a family with deep roots in the area. His grandparents met at Hillsdale College, but he went to Northwood, Michigan’s other strong free-market school.
His first project at the Mackinac Center was a study on the state of Michigan’s budget. It is a topic he continues working on to this day.
“I’m still doing the same thing I first started doing when I was 18 — finding interesting and relevant information to drive the public debate,” James says.
He and his interns comb through the budget every year, updating a spreadsheet containing every line item of state spending.
“One of the regular things I ask of my interns is that they tell me something interesting they’ve found in the state budget,” he says. “It would be very hard for anyone to go through Michigan’s budget without realizing that government does not work the way its strongest supporters believe it should.”
James also has expertise on other fiscal policy issues, including state and local pension systems (and their consistent underfunding). His work documenting the enormous costs of pension debt helped lawmakers when they tried to limit exposure to pension underfunding in 2017.
He is a critic of the way state government offers incentives to hand-picked corporations. “I enjoy working across ideological lines to increase skepticism of select corporate subsidy programs,” James says. “Republicans and Democrats have supported corporate welfare for a long time, unfortunately, but we’ve been able to change some minds.”
The long-time generosity of the Morey Foundation allows James to do this type of work. The Mackinac Center’s work in that area is now done under the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative.
James also tries to reinvigorate the public benefit principles that ought to apply to government spending.
“The closest free-market policy ever got to being the law of the land was in the late 19th century,” he says. “Bottom-up efforts from the state to prevent public spending for select private benefits were enshrined into state constitutions, including in Michigan, and through judicial rulings. I hope that my work can play a small part in revitalizing interest in this principle.”
