This article originally appeared in The Detroit News May 26, 2026.
If I were emperor for a day (or merely the FCC chairman), I would be tempted to ban the word “unbelievable” from live sports broadcasts. The word shows up in nearly every game. A clutch home run or a tough putt, and the announcer tells us the play is beyond belief.
Students in Detroit have spent decades grappling with educational challenges, leaving many without access to the opportunities they deserve. Jaquetta Lee joins the Overton Window Podcast to describe the city’s complex education picture, explain the importance of personalized learning, and recommend policy reforms that would better serve Detroit’s children and families.
This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News May 3 2026.
Gavin Newsom is clearly auditioning for a bigger stage. But if the California governor is really going to run for president, he’d better hope voters don’t see his blooper reel. There are many bad policy takes, but one of the worst is Newsom’s expansion of Hollywood subsidies. The whole episode is guaranteed to fall flat with a national audience.
Usually the state budget has a precise number for how much spending it authorizes from federal funds. The budget for the fiscal year that starts in October does not. And this has raised some controversy about the topline number for how much spending the budget authorizes. But this wouldn’t even be a controversy in most states. That’s because lawmakers and journalists in other states don’t bother to include federal funding when presenting state budgets.
Gongwer News Service reports that there will be 286 property tax increases on the August 4 election. There shouldn’t be any. Lawmakers ought to ask for all tax elections to be part of the election when most people vote, the November election.
The state constitution requires popular support for all new local government taxes, and so new local government property tax levies have to be authorized by voters. This is meant to ensure popular support of tax policy.
Voters get a raw deal when legislators take taxpayer money and give it to select businesses. Corporate subsidies are ineffective at creating jobs, unfair to taxpayers and other businesses, and expensive to the state budget. Every state legislator has a record on the subject, and voters should pay close attention.
This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal February 3, 2026.
Keeping up with your children’s schoolwork can be hard. But they need something even more important from you. Pay attention to your school board. Better yet, run for it. Too many boards fail to serve children. Unless parents commit, nothing will improve.
Buying fruits and vegetables shouldn’t be frightening. Across the United States consumers place their trust in farmers to provide safe, healthy food. This summer, that trust has been shaken by a multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis linked to fresh produce.
“Building Michigan's economy takes time — and it's paying off.”
That's the headline of a recent Detroit News op-ed by Quentin Messer Jr., chief executive officer of the Michigan Economic Development Corp., the state's economic development agency. But objective evidence suggests that even after decades of subsidies, the agency has little to show for its efforts.
If there is one thing that unites Michiganders, it is our competitive spirit toward our heart-shaped neighbor to the south, Ohio. We have many things to be proud of: more acres of forests and protected wilderness, the most miles of freshwater coastline in the nation, a unique culture and history, and a university that has the most wins of any program in NCAA D1 football history.
Imagine being confined to a nursing home bed, falling out and breaking a femur. When you complain of the pain, you aren’t offered any pain medication, and you have to wait 20 hours before being sent to an emergency room.
This situation isn’t fiction for one Michigan-based patient. While the facility and many like it maintain a respectable online rating, inspections by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies paint a different picture. Unfortunately, Michigan’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities are characterized by overloaded staff, bed shortages, and decreased quality of care.
Gov. Whitmer signed a bill July 21 that authorizes $1.6 billion in new subsidies for developers. The bill has been added to the Mackinac Center’s Michigan business subsidy scorecard.
The state operates a program that awards select developers money to construct their buildings. The developer receives money from state taxes that would otherwise be collected by the state. This includes the income taxes paid by employees that construct the site, sales taxes collected from retail operations in the building, income taxes of people working in the building, and income taxes of people living in the building. A deal can deliver this money to a developer for up to 20 years.
Detroit has been the center of a long educational struggle that leaves students poorly served by public schools. Parents and community members have responded by seeking learning opportunities beyond pubic institutions. Jessica Snowden, a Detroit mother, business owner, and education advocate, joins the Overton Window Podcast to discuss the city’s evolving educational landscape and the importance of the Schools of Choice program.
The U.S. Supreme Court's latest term produced several decisions that impact law and policy in Michigan and around the country. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation has prepared the following review to help explain the nature of select cases, what the Court decided, how these decisions will affect Michigan, and what to look for in future policy developments. Together, these decisions will shape the legal and policy landscape for years to come.
I am grateful for Michigan Economic Development Corporation CEO Quentin Messer’s response to my op-ed in The Detroit News pointing out how few jobs result from major subsidy deals. State spending deals made during Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s term promised 20,595 jobs and have delivered just 602 so far. In his defense of subsidies, Messer suggests that we just haven’t waited long enough for these deals to pay off:
Michigan's affordability challenge is driven by higher prices on goods and services and the inability of some people to find higher-paying jobs. A series of bills in the state Senate would make this challenge a little easier.
Two to three million people in Michigan have some type of criminal record and roughly one out of every five workers needs a government license in order to work legally in his or her chosen profession. But state licensing laws significantly restrict people with criminal backgrounds from working.
By Jack Belcher
Two new Michigan House bills backed by the American Civil Liberties Union seek to ease concerns about license plate readers by limiting how the government can use the data networked camera systems acquire. The bills also impose transparency rules on government agencies.
Do you ever wonder how your tax dollars are being spent? How much money doctors, public school employees and projects receive from the public? Transparency is a core duty of government, and Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act provides the tools you need to get accurate information about how the state functions.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News June 23, 2026.
Americans spend a lot of time arguing about what’s wrong with the country. Sometimes international visitors help remind us what’s wonderful about it, and what we take for granted.
The 2026 World Cup is here. The United States is one of the host countries, and preliminary matches are scattered in cities across the country. I am not much of a soccer fan, but it’s hard to escape the ubiquitous event.
Michigan is afflicted with near-stagnant population growth, and many parents who want childcare struggle to find it. The state’s lawmakers can address both problems by revisiting the regulations they place on childcare providers.
The state ranks in the middle of the country in a recent review of childcare regulations. That number comes from the Archbridge Institute, which released a report of childcare regulations across the 50 states. It created an index based on a composite score of four different regulatory requirements: child-to-staff ratios, group size limitations, and mandatory employee education and training rules. Archbridge scholars calculated how strict or flexible a state is in regulating childcare centers. Michigan was 25th, suggesting that the state can reform its policies to protect children while making daycare more available for those who want it.
Tax policy can have unexpected consequences. To take one example, high excise taxes on cigarettes have fueled small- and large-scale smuggling, theft, counterfeit products and violence against both civilians and police. Policymakers should take note: Consumers do not eagerly await to pay more in ever-higher taxes. They change their behavior, often in ways that undermine the goals tax advocates hope to achieve.
The new state budget authorizes 174 pork projects at a cost of $180 million. This sum is down from the last budget’s figure of $360 million and down from 2023 when lawmakers approved $1.8 billion in pork projects. While spending a tenth of what we once spent is an improvement, a look at the projects shows why it’s still a lot of spending on items that shouldn’t be in the budget.
Lawmakers approved a new state budget that spends $50.3 billion in money from the state’s taxes and fees. This is a 3.8% increase from the budget passed last year and this year’s increase is above sustainable levels.
Roads get the biggest increase in the budget. In 2025, lawmakers swapped sales taxes on fuel — which largely go to schools — for a per-gallon tax that largely goes to road repair. They also raised marijuana taxes and earmarked the state’s corporate income tax to transportation purposes. These changes meant more road funding for the upcoming fiscal year, and the transportation budget spends $593 million more.
South Carolina is moving to reduce personal income tax rates and possibly to eliminate its income tax over time. Palmetto Promise, a Columbia-based policy institute, took a leading role in this movement, and Senior Fellow Oran P. Smith joins the Overton Window Podcast to discuss how it all happened.
Jon Erwin’s “Young Washington” exceeded expectations in its opening weekend, taking in $19.7 million against a projected $15 million, drawing a 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and even winning some grudging respect from the mainstream movie industry. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, as institutional as film critics come, praised aspects of the Angel Studios production and called it “competent enough to create that crisp tug of schoolkid patriotism the books we read as children provided.”
