This article originally appeared in The Detroit News May 29, 2025.
Is Michigan in for a tax hike in 2025? It will be if state Democrats get their way.
Michigan Democratic lawmakers are trying to figure out what tax they should raise in order to fund roads. They’ve proposed hiking Corporate Income Taxes, marijuana taxes and trash taxes. They also have recommended new taxes on digital services and nicotine vaporizers.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News May 6, 2025.
“What’s the dirtiest job you’ve ever had?”
I was with a group of friends and this question came up. We each shared our stories. One guy had power washed sidewalks soaked in a backsplash of grime. Another worked in manufacturing; he finished each day with forearms bristling with tiny shards of metal. Another catered major events in New York City.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News May 20, 2025.
A few months ago, I was on YouTube and saw a band I hadn’t heard of. The band offered a new album for free — a full hour of 1970s heavy blues rock, Jimi Hendrix meets Pearl Jam. I listened to the entire album and every single note hit me at the core. I loved it.
State lawmakers keep picking the auto industry as a winner, but their bets fail to deliver. Lawmakers ought to be more careful the next time an automaker comes around with a factory to sell.
Elected officials in Michigan and other states keep making huge deals for every auto plant. Georgia gave Hyundai and Rivian deals worth $2.1 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively, in 2022. Michigan offered $1.7 billion to Ford in 2023. Tennessee and Kentucky offered the company $1.3 billion in 2021. North Carolina got in the game with a $1.3 billion deal for Vietnamese automaker Vinfast. And so on. Every state wants to roll out the red carpet for the next auto plant, especially if it will make electric vehicles.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News May 13, 2025.
Midland voters clobbered a school bond proposal on May 6 with a stunning 68% “no” vote. This in a town strong on civic pride that normally approves local school measures.
Midland Public Schools Board of Education President Phil Rausch and Superintendent Penny Miller-Nelson expressed their disappointment. “Over the next several weeks, we will review the results of this election and consider our options for moving forward as a school community,” they said.
This article originally appeared in the Lansing State Journal May 14, 2025.
Voters rejected a second consecutive school bond proposal in St. Johns and by a larger margin than the first. There appears to be a disconnect between the priorities of voters in the St. Johns School District and those of school officials.
There are many unanswered questions about the state's response to the COVID-19 emergency five years ago. One thing is certain about the next pandemic, though: It will be mired in legal controversy.
If another pandemic panic arises, the state health department plans to run a repeat of its COVID-19 response. Citing a broadly worded public health law, the state health director will grant herself unilateral authority to issue orders that might restrict high school sports or mandate masks or ration medical services. The department will make up the details as it goes.
Detroit and its surrounding communities have some of the most restrictive laws against building housing in the country. Unsurprisingly, this prevents new homes from being built while spiking home and rental costs.
The Detroit News reports that almost all places in the Detroit area continued to see prices rise last year. In some communities, housing costs increased more than 20% year-over-year.
Traverse City Light & Power is bragging that it may finally finish Phase 1 of its municipal broadband network by the end of 2025. The utility hopes that the network will have a positive cash flow in 2026. The project has shown losses for each year since it was launched in 2019 and is expected to lose $645,000 this year.
People in power have a longstanding desire to shut down debate that challenges their views. And even though American colleges and universities are supposed to stand up for academic freedom and open debate, they have trampled on their students’ First Amendment rights. Ryne Weiss is doing something to change that. As director of research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, he’s helping administrators do better at allowing students and faculty to talk about controversial matters.
Michigan’s economy is experiencing the consequences of the state’s two years of Democratic policymaking.
Michigan’s Democratic lawmakers passed a lot of bad laws in 2023. They now force workers to pay unions. They voted to stop using the state’s already paid-for power plants and move to unreliable wind and solar. They increased the costs of government construction for no other reason than to hand construction unions a favor. And they gave out billions in pork projects.
Support for Dept. of Ed. barely tops one-third in Tennessee poll
Half of Tennesseeans support abolition of the United States Department of Education, according to the most recent poll from the Beacon Center in Nashville. Just 37% of survey respondents support keeping the Carter-era department, which costs taxpayers about a quarter of a trillion dollars per year. The remaining 13% remained undecided. The Beacon Center also found 61% support for amending the Volunteer State's constitution to ban property taxes. And in an ominous turn for America's country home, rock, with 30% support, edged out country, with 26%, as the state's favorite musical genre.
Are Michigan lawmakers shooting at the wrong target in the road funding debate?
Administrators estimate that they can get 90% of aid-eligible roads into good or fair condition by fiscal year 2034-35 if taxpayers spend an extra $2.5 billion annually. This has been endorsed by a number of interest groups.
Michiganders without access to high-speed internet are still waiting for internet service funded by the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program through the Michigan High-Speed Internet Office. The Michigan High-Speed Internet Office recently said in testimony before the legislature than no one will be connected using BEAD funds until at least 2026.
This article originally appeared in The Hill May 1, 2025.
Republicans are falling into a familiar trap. From President Trump to Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a growing number of party leaders have come to believe that coercive labor unions are a permanent part of American politics, so the Republicans might as well forge an uneasy truce if not an outright alliance with them.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined 14 other states to sue President Trump for improperly declaring an energy emergency. But Nessel did nothing when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer exceeded her emergency authority.
Whitmer used emergency powers to order some of the nation's most severe COVID-19 lockdowns. Nessel supported the governor's unprecedented actions every step of the way. The Michigan Supreme Court later ruled that the governor had misused these powers.
Authorities in Spain and Portugal are still investigating the cause of the worst blackout in their nations’ histories. But the massive power failure follows years of risky renewable energy campaigns that have severely weakened the power grid on the Iberian Peninsula.
Michigan lawmakers took another step toward reducing unnecessary occupational licensing barriers, a key reform supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
House bills 4103 and 4104, which passed the House on a nearly unanimous basis, would have Michigan enter into multistate compacts for occupational therapists, occupational therapy assistants and physician assistants and make some related changes to state law. This would allow workers licensed in those fields to easily work in all the states that entered into the compact. The bills still need to pass the Senate and be signed by the governor to take effect.
What would be better: Reduce the number of students in a classroom by one or give the teacher a $10,000 raise? That type of trade-off is the reality of school budgets.
But as Michigan debates new statewide regulations on class sizes, few are talking about the trade-offs involved. Smaller class sizes require more teachers and more spending. Michigan already has one teacher for every 14 students, according to Mischooldata.org. Ten years ago, there were 16 students per teacher.
Can a president unilaterally impose tariffs on nearly every imported good, bypassing Congress?
That’s the question at the heart of a discussion with Jeffrey Schwab, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, on the Overton Window Podcast.
“We filed a lawsuit called VOS Selections v. Trump. Our firm, the Liberty Justice Center, is representing five individual small businesses free of charge,” Schwab says.
This article originally appeared in Real Clear Markets April 30, 2025.
The Biden and Trump administrations agree: It’s time to use antitrust laws to break up the largest American technology companies. On April 14, the FTC began a trial against Meta, in a case originally brought in the first Trump administration and continued during Biden years. Yet the case will be difficult for the government to win because it’s built on a shaky legal foundation.
President Trump’s global tariffs have been justified by a simple story. The rest of the world is taking advantage of us. Americans buy tons of stuff from abroad, and this has decimated domestic industry. Foreign competitors are eating our lunch, and we can’t keep up.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News April 22, 2025.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called out the plight of young men in society in her recent State of the State address. Single women, she said, are three times more likely to buy a house today than single men. Whitmer also decried a gender gap in the Michigan Reconnect program, where female college enrollment outpaces male enrollment two-to-one.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News April 16 2025.
MIDLAND — A young woman dressed in a professional business outfit shook my hand and introduced herself.
“Hello, I’m Claire, your first affirmative speaker.”
“I’m Ethan, the second affirmative speaker,” said her partner, with a firm handshake.
Michigan’s roads will continue to fall apart faster than the state will repair them, according to the latest projections. The Transportation Asset Management Council’s annual Roads and Bridges report includes a forecast for pavement quality, which the report says will decline over the next decade. While 68% of roads are in good or fair condition now, the report expects that number to drop to 54%.
