In a recent radio interview with Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative Director Michael LaFaive, radio host Tony Conley stated that we should be looking at what Texas and North Carolina are doing to foster economic development. Any benchmarking attempt should first start with the right states, but North Carolina isn't one of them.
School spending — an area of expertise for Mackinac Center analysts — continues to dominate the headlines.
A Kalamazoo Gazette story about school district consolidation cites the Center's 2009 school privatization survey, which showed that almost 45 percent of school districts in Michigan were saving money by privatizing non-instructional services. The story also refers to a 2007 study by Andrew Coulson, an adjunct scholar with the Center, which examines consolidation. Coulson found that there is a potential for cost savings for districts based on an optimal size of 2,900 students, but ultimately consolidation would not save enough money to consider it as a serious strategy.
The U.S. Forest Service has issued new regulations regarding guiding and outfitting on national forest lands. If you plan to guide someone in the fall bear season and you have not made application for a permit, you may be out of luck as the application deadline was July 1. The new requirements include a permit fee of between $150 and $600 depending on the number of days of activity. In addition to the permit fee, guides and outfitters must secure a minimum of $500,000 in liability insurance and submit an operation plan. A permit from the Forest Service for guiding and outfitting is required even for a nonprofit operation.
The Senate met one day this week and passed several non-controversial measures with unanimous votes. The House had one session scheduled but there was no quorum and no votes were taken.
Senate Bill 1093, Authorize Army Airborne license plates,
passed in the Senate (34 to 0)
To offer a special license plate to current or former members of the Army
Airborne.
Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey has written open letters to the two main gubernatorial candidates — Virg Bernero and Rick Snyder — in attempt to get clarification of their views on a variety of labor and other issues.
Check back here for their answers.
Michigan's business, labor and regulatory climate must change if the state's economy is going to recover, Mike LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, explained today on "The Tony Conley Show" on WILS 1320AM in Lansing. You can listen to the interview at: http://www.webwiseforradio.com/site_files/368/Media/Tony/lafaive_08_12c.mp3
Michigan Public Radio recently turned to Education Policy Director Mike Van Beek to explain some of the issues surrounding funding for Michigan's public schools, which some seem to constantly claim are underfunded, despite evidence to the contrary.
Van Beek discussed his research on the costs of school health insurance plans, and has also examined some of the common myths about public school funding.
Michigan's share of the loot from the "edujobs" bill passed by Congress this week will be about $310 million. We're told that this will "save" 4,700 teacher jobs in Michigan. That's highly unlikely, for a couple of reasons.
First, most of the "4,700 layoffs" are administrative fictions, as explained here. Second, even if all 4,700 layoffs were real, the new money would divide out to $66,000 per teacher — but the teachers that districts hire back will almost certainly cost more than this.
President Obama, Gov. Granholm and much of the political class are misleading the public by leaving out key information when they say that the $26 billion state budgets bailout bill signed into law yesterday will reverse "thousands of teacher layoffs."
Special interest groups whose members' compensation comes from tax dollars are afraid that Michigan's economic crisis will impact their paychecks. They're right to be concerned since there is less private money left to pay generous public-sector salaries and benefits. Here's a reminder of the compensation gap between the two sectors.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sen. Debbie Stabenow were quick to praise the new "edujobs" bill passed by the House Tuesday as part of a "stimulus II" package (and despite it lacking a legal title). Among other legislation it will dole out $310 million to Michigan public schools, with the hopes of "saving" 4,700 teacher jobs.
A new report by the Michigan League for Human Services bemoans the lack of tax money going to higher education. But the authors give a skewed view of appropriations, get some facts wrong, and completely miss the 800-pound gorilla of higher education: that increasing costs drive tuition increases.
Detroit Free Press columnist Stephen Henderson says Michigan needs the money that will come from the so-called 'edujobs' bill, but the state must also tackle the issue of school spending reform.
"Even more important, we're taking this money to retain teachers (an estimated 4,200) who are still not, on average, contributing near what they should be to their benefits packages," Henderson writes.
A number of pundits here and nationally have pointed to recent primary results as evidence that the Tea Party movement is ineffective or a failure. These analyses are flawed, because they are based on a conventional Republican vs. Democrat electoral politics worldview. This misses the Tea Party’s rejection of the entire ruling class establishment, including the major political parties as currently constituted.
Michigan residents can expect to pay significantly higher energy bills in the future due in large part to state law that requires that 10 percent of electricity sales in the state come from renewable sources, such as wind.
The Institute for Energy Research recently released a report titled "Energy Regulation in the States: A Wake-up Call," that found that states with binding renewable portfolio standards have electricity rates nearly 40 percent higher than states without renewable energy mandates. The higher rates in states with a renewable energy portfolio standard may not be entirely caused by the mandates, although there is a strong cause-and-effect relationship to renewable energy mandates and higher electricity rates.
In a lengthy article that covers most of the issues and angles pertaining to public school teacher compensation, the Michigan Education Association continued its perpetual campaign to obfuscate the facts about average teacher pay.
In response to the fact that the average Michigan teacher salary is 15 percent higher than the national average, the MEA said school employees have agreed to $1 billion in concessions over the last three years (a claim they've been repeating for almost a full year). This claim remains unproven, and in any event is irrelevant to a comparison of average teacher salaries. Even if there were a $1 billion worth of concessions, all of it could have come from non-teaching union members. The MEA uses this figure without differentiating teachers from non-teachers.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm's office and the Department of Human Services appear to be at odds over the classification of some 40,000 small-business owners who were forced into a union.
A spokeswoman for Granholm told the Washington Examiner that, "We do regard home-based childcare workers as public employees." DHS has previously insisted that the home-based day care owners are self-employed.
A recent USA Today story trumpets the alleged successes of taxpayer-subsidized state tourism programs, although it doesn't account for the cost of the programs and what could have been done with that money had it been left in the pockets of those who earned it.
Patrick J. Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, was a guest on "The Frank Beckmann Show" on WJR 760AM this morning, discussing recent findings that point directly to Gov. Jennifer Granholm's role in the forced unionization of more than 40,000 small-business owners.
CNN is reporting that the U.S. Postal Service lost $3.5 billion in its most recent quarter. Are there alternatives? This Current Comment from August 2007 — the most popular item on the Mackinac Center's website that year — explores that issue.
The Legislature did not meet this week. Instead of votes, this report contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
Senate Bill 1441 (Allow Spartan Stores (but not competitors) to hold wine tastings)
Introduced by Sen. Mark Jansen (R) on July 28, 2010, to allow the Spartan Stores grocery chain (but not other grocery chains like Meijer, Kroger, etc.) to hold wine tastings in its stores.
The Mackinac Center has obtained a copy of a lawsuit today filed by the attorney for 11 contractors hired to perform work on a building now known as Hangar42. You can read the complaint by clicking here.
Hangar42 was supposed to be a functioning film studio run out of Walker, a suburb of Grand Rapids, thanks in-part to the state promise of an "assignable" tax credit worth $10 million. Gov. Jennifer Granholm bragged about this economic development deal in her State of the State address last February.
The Mackinac Center broke the story after a months-long investigation by Communications Specialist Kathy Hoekstra and myself that raised questions about the efficacy of the deal. In May we posted this essay and video with our findings. The research and reporting ultimately led to an Attorney General investigation and a criminal charge against the primary buyer of the studio, Joseph Peters.
The Mackinac Center has written extensively about the Michigan Film Office and the state's film subsidy program. For more information see "Special Effects: Flawed Report Provides Distorted Lens."
The average teacher salary in the St. Joseph Public Schools was $57,861 in 2009, and employees are not required to contribute anything to health insurance policies that cost the district some $11,400 annually. These are among the highlights in the current collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the district and the local arm of the Michigan Education Association union.
In a speech that careened from apologetic to apocalyptic before settling on anti-democratic, incoming UAW President Bob King addressed more of his ambitions for the union. Optimists who hope for a more business-savvy UAW will focus on the first half, in which he acknowledged some mistakes, in particular the “Jobs Banks” that kept laid-off autoworkers on company payrolls at nearly full salary, but realists will quickly recognize that the second half, in which King attempted to reclaim the union’s old economic and political clout, is what really matters.
