A little disagreement in the Michigan Legislature can be a good thing. Lawmakers passed a record low number of bills into law in 2025. Even better, they approved no new business subsidies. None. That’s the first time that has happened in decades, and it vindicates one of the Mackinac Center’s key messages.
We’ve been trying to foster bipartisan skepticism about taking money from all taxpayers and handing it to select companies. That practice is ineffective at creating jobs, unfair to businesses that do not receive largesse, and costly to the state government. It also ought to offend our basic principles of what government should do. The state should set the rules for everyone, not play favorites in the private economy. This is not how a free market works.
It looks like our efforts are paying off. The state budget reflects growing bipartisan skepticism about corporate welfare.
It wasn’t always this way. We keep a scorecard of how legislators vote on business subsidies, and thanks to our Michigan Votes legislative tracker, we can go back to 2000. In the early 2000s, the Republican-led Legislature couldn’t agree with the Democratic governor about much, except that the state needed to subsidize more businesses.
This was not limited to the Granholm administration. Elected officials approve $900 million a year in business subsidies on average. But they approved none in 2025.
It’s great to see our work influence the policy debate. We’ve maintained a consistent position the whole time. We’ve done sophisticated empirical research to demonstrate that the spending just doesn’t work. We’ve tested messages to win people over. We’ve highlighted excesses and abuses of economic development officials. We’ve shown that the deals between state officials and subsidy recipients rarely deliver on their promises. Indeed, for every 100 jobs that lawmakers promise to create, they produce just nine jobs.
We must keep up the case against selective business subsidies. There is a perpetual demand that politicians show they’re doing something about jobs. And politicians naturally assume the most direct way to do that is to write large public checks to big companies.
It feels great to make a difference. It is satisfying when lawmakers reiterate our findings when taking stances on good policy. And I am excited to keep the opposition to selective business subsidies going in 2026.
