Congresspeople are going to decide whether they want to stick it to big financial firms that they claim are pushing up the cost of living by buying up all the houses. Or so they say.
The truth about institutional investment in the housing market is far more complicated, and the effects aren’t all bad. But politicians would prefer you not look at the issue too hard. They would like you to pretend this is a simple story with a villain you can punch.
Persuasion is more than just showing the other person you’re right, Joshua Bandoch says.
“When I try to win against you, it's usually at a cost to you,” Bandoch, a policy analyst, TedX speaker and author of “How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion,” tells this week’s Overton Window Podcast. “I do think most people are like, ‘I wanna win. And if that means you lose, hey, you know, whatever.’ That just makes you a loser, which stinks.”
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2026 issue of IMPACT magazine.
A battle in Lansing over affordable housing is morphing into a debate over the wrong question. Unless lawmakers understand what the argument is really about, we may lose a rare opportunity to get ahead of a problem with bipartisan cooperation. Liberty, not locality, is the question.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News March 10, 2026.
President Donald Trump and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer don’t agree on much. But when courts limited their emergency powers, they responded identically — they looked for another statute and kept going.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News March 31, 2026.
The ideal election policy is easy to state and hard to achieve. Elections should be well-run and secure while remaining accessible to every eligible voter. Votes should be counted accurately, and the process should inspire confidence. Even if your candidate didn’t win, you should know the election was conducted fairly.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News March 17, 2026.
Michigan’s lockdown architects are lining up to tell us it was a mistake.
The latest comes from Robert Gordon and Nicholas Bagley. Gordon was director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services until January 2021. Bagley served as legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News March 24, 2026.
Lawmakers in Washington State just created a new “millionaire tax” — the first income tax in state history. Hours after the bill passed, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that he and his wife had left Seattle after living there 44 years. While Schultz said the move gets them closer to their children, the timing was notable. Schultz follows other high earners leaving inhospitable states, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
By Cami Pendell
In a time of sharp divisions and fiery rhetoric, civility can seem like a remnant of a quieter past. But for those committed to advancing free markets and limited government, civility is essential to progress. It is the foundation on which durable ideas are built, tested and ultimately adopted.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News March 3, 2026.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration is not over, but her final State of the State address last week marks the beginning of the end. A governor’s first State of the State is about the agenda. The fourth address is the case for continuity and reelection. The eighth is about legacy, accomplishments and unfinished business.
Michigan’s budget process has been sharply improved by new statutes that require legislators to file public requests when they seek grants for projects of their choice. It used to be that these grants, sometimes called earmarks or pork projects, popped into the budget at the last minute with no public warning. Now legislators have to describe the projects they want and what the money will be used for. The process gives legislators a chance to show that that their requests benefit all Michigan residents, not just the direct beneficiaries.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is stretching the limits of her emergency powers, just as she did during the COVID-19 panic. She declared a state emergency on April 2, suspending some state rules about what kind of gasoline may be sold, because prices reached $3.89 per gallon. State law gives governors the authority to unilaterally suspend rules or laws, among other actions, in case of an energy shortage. But Whitmer’s justification is based on high gas prices rather than a threat to Michigan’s energy supply.
Food trucks in Michigan have been banned, overly regulated and even, occasionally, subsidized. None of that has been good public policy, and state lawmakers are doing something about it. A proposed package of bills would set up a new framework.
House bills 5450 and 5451 are sponsored by Rep. Timothy Beson, R-Bangor Township. They would, according to Michigan Votes, “revise Michigan’s Food Law to create a more uniform statewide regulatory framework for mobile food establishments by prohibiting local fees and taxes on mobile vendors, while also strengthening safety and transparency through mandatory annual and post-modification fire inspections, public access to inspection records, and standardized compliance and reporting requirements.”
Special economic zones have brought prosperity to places like Hong Kong and Singapore, but they have never been tried in the United States. Michigan developer Rod Lockwood wants to change that by turning Detroit’s Belle Isle into a separate polity that would avoid the Motor City’s crushing taxes and regulations. In a new version of his 2013 novel “Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer,” Lockwood demonstrates how a special economic zone on the island, which now serves as a park, could turn around the fortunes of Detroit as well as Windsor, Ont., and the entire Midwest.
Even the biggest opponents of a bill to make zoning less burdensome agree that local zoning rules prevent the housing people want from getting built. In response to a bill to preempt local governments rules that prohibit most types of housing to be built, local government advocates introduced their own legislation to subsidize local governments that loosen building rules.
Most people agree that local zoning rules are preventing construction of the kind of housing people want – even municipal governments themselves. Two bill packages in the Michigan legislature, including one proposed by associations for local governments, propose to reduce the zoning burden at the local level.
Michigan lawmakers had $9 billion in expected surplus funds at their disposal in January 2023. Many people today wonder what happened to that money. The short answer is that lawmakers spent it. The better question is whether the spending was worth it.
Michigan ranks 16th on the Tax Foundation’s State Tax Competitiveness Index. Ranking in the top third is fairly good, but Michigan’s trajectory is not. The state ranked 11th only five years ago and has been sliding ever since. While other states improve their tax competitiveness, Michigan is standing still.
The ongoing litigation and legislation campaign against Mackinac Island ferry operators became a little clearer when a federal judge dismissed the city of Mackinac Island’s antitrust claims against the ferry companies. The city had claimed that the current arrangement among the ferry companies is an illegal monopoly and tried to assume the power to regulate ferry fares and parking fees on mainland parking lots.
Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding this July, and rightly so. But March marks another significant event from 1776 that demands our attention.
A few months before the American founders approved the Declaration of Independence, the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith published “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” widely known by its shorthand title, The Wealth of Nations.
Rx Kids distributes cash to pregnant women and young mothers in Michigan. A pilot program that launched in Flint in 2024 quickly expanded to dozens of cities. Lawmakers gave $270 million to the program this year.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman championed helping the poor with direct cash payments, and others agreed. Economic theory says programs such as Rx Kids should outperform typical government welfare systems, which are run by distant bureaucracies and controlled by politicians. Rx Kids takes a different approach and trusts that recipients know how to help themselves better than government officials do.
Michigan is finally inching toward putting its $1.6 billion share of federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds to work. Nearly five years after the federal bill was passed, the state of Michigan received approval from Washington for it’s final plan in order to access and deploy the funds. Things are moving at the speed of government.
This article originally appeared in USA Today February 19, 2026.
The past few years have been tough for criminal justice reform. While the 2010s saw a slew of smart state and federal policies, making communities safer and saving taxpayer money, concerns over crime in the 2020s put further progress on hold.
Jonah Goldberg has spent decades writing columns, authoring books, and appearing on television. But a few years ago, he decided the media landscape needed something different.
Goldberg joins The Overton Window Podcast to talk about where that led him: The Dispatch, a digital media company he co-founded with Steve Hayes that has quietly become one of the more interesting experiments in modern journalism.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recommends a series of tax hikes in her executive budget, spending that would boost state outlays beyond sustainable levels. The governor recommends a 4% increase in the state budget, not counting federal transfers.
Michigan lawmakers do not need to tax people more.
Congress is considering a 10% cap on credit card interest rates and President Trump voiced his support for such legislation in his Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump said that capping the interest rate on credit card debt at 10% would “help millions of Americans save for a home.”
