Today is April 15, the last day to file your 2009 tax return. Protests are happening around the state alleging rampant growth of government, overtaxation and overregulation.
Here are some facts about taxes in Michigan.
As of fiscal 2009, the State of Michigan received $23.3 billion in revenue from state taxes.
Teacher contracts are coming under greater scrutiny as Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the Michigan Legislature continue to create overspending crises that mean fewer dollars going to public schools.
"Most people probably don't have a good idea of what the pay and benefits of school employees are," Jack McHugh, senior legislative analyst, told WLNS-TV6 in Lansing.
A recent Macomb Daily editorial agrees with the point made a month ago by a Mackinac Center scholar regarding proposed legislation to cap teacher and superintendent salaries.
Mike Van Beek, director of education policy, wrote in March that benefits, not salaries, is where public school spending is most out of line compared to the private sector. Other areas where public schools could reduce overspending, Van Beek noted, include privatizing non-core support services, repealing the state's prevailing wage law that forces schools to spend an additional $250 million a year on construction, and embracing schools-of-choice.
A Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Mackinac Center scholar Burton Folsom Jr. and his wife Anita was the most e-mailed commentary on the paper's Web site Monday.
Titled "Did FDR End the Depression?" the piece takes from Folsom's recent book, "New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America," and corrects the commonly held myth that President Roosevelt's policies brought an end to the Great Depression.
More home-based day care providers are speaking out about being forced into a union they didn't know existed and did not vote for, according to The Oakland Press.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Human Services over the illegal unionization of about 40,000 day care owners has moved to the Michigan Supreme Court, while the National Federation of Independent Business has filed an amicus brief in support of the Center's case. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has filed a separate class action suit in the matter against Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
The odds of a local municipality in Michigan passing a tax increase in the current economic climate are fairly low, according to Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative.
"This is the wrong time to reach deeper into American pockets," he told The Bay City Times. "It will only remind voters of the new class warfare - government employees vs. those who pay their bills."
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week. Because the legislature did not meet this week, rather than roll call vote results this report presents a sampling of recently proposed state laws.
The recent death of Alex Chilton apparently wasn't as much from a heart attack as it was a lack of nationalized health insurance, if one is to believe Facebook comments prompted by a recent article by Keith Spera of The Times-Picayune. "Cause, meet effect," wrote a prominent music critic friend of mine. In response, another wrote: "This is so sad, and makes me so angry... that someone would end up dying because they don't have insurance."
Charlie Owens, Michigan state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, was a guest on "The Frank Beckmann Show" on WJR this morning discussing a friend of the court brief the NFIB has filed in the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's Loar v. DHS lawsuit challenging the forced unionization of some 40,000 small-business owners and private contractors in Michigan.
It would be a huge stretch to say that the UAW’s decision to sue GM over the company’s failure to make payments into union-controlled pension funds signals the beginning of the end for the automaker. But the lawsuit does serve as a reminder of the one important truth about the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies: the Detroit-based auto companies still have a lot of problems that went unaddressed in the rushed and politicized process to which they were subjected.
Nearly every aspect of a teacher's job falls under the rules of a union contract. The following is an analysis of the current collective bargaining agreement for teachers and a few other employee groups in the East Lansing School District. The district employs about 220 teachers and enrolls 3,400 students. Of its $34 million operating budget (excluding capital and debt services expenditures), about 70 percent goes towards paying employees covered by this contract.
Bold strokes, such as cutting taxes and reducing the cost of public-employee benefits, are needed to help Michigan rebound, Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman said Tuesday as part of a panel discussion at Wayne State University.
The forum, covered by The Detroit News, featured several speakers discussing Michigan's economy and how best to revive it.
The illegal shanghaiing of home-based day care providers into a government employees union has attracted the attention of the Small Business Legal Center at the National Federation of Independent Business. It filed an amicus brief with the Michigan Supreme Court requesting that the Court grant the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's appeal in the Loar v. DHS lawsuit challenging the forced unionization.
The Detroit Free Press reports that the City of Detroit began demolition of buildings without testing for asbestos. Asbestos, a carcinogen, was used extensively as a building material and is present in many older buildings. During demolition, small particles of asbestos can become airborne unless safety precautions are followed as prescribed by federal law. According to Robert McCann, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment, "The city also failed to notify the state of its demolition plans as required by federal law, which is another serious violation." In light of the serious nature of the alleged violation of state and federal asbestos laws, it is remarkable that McCann goes on to say he thinks the DNRE and the City of Detroit can work things out without penalties. His statement smacks of a double standard. If these serious violations were perpetrated by a private business, it is highly unlikely that DNRE officials would be so lenient.
Radio and television host Glenn Beck's new book will be titled based on a theory established by the Center's late vice president, Joseph Overton, according to The Washington Post.
Beck's book, due out in June, will be titled "We Are Americans: The Overton Window." Beck first expressed an interest in the theory on his Fox News Channel television show last November. Center President Joseph G. Lehman explains the Overton Window here.
MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week. The Legislature did not meet this week, so instead of votes this week's report contains several newly introduced bills of interest.
House Bill 5963, sponsored by Rep. Tim Melton (D-Pontiac) would force schools to spend down their general fund balances to 15 percent of their current operating expenditures. This attempt to micromanage their budgets isn't likely to help schools become more fiscally stable or deal with dwindling enrollment and the resulting declines in revenue.
The Detroit Free Press reported today that the White House announced yesterday that it will buy the first 100 plug-in electric vehicles to roll off American assembly lines before the end of the year. Surprise: The only car to meet that qualification is the Chevy Volt, which coincidentally started production at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant on the same day of the White House announcement. Apparently, federal purchasing requirements have been creatively constructed to allow the U.S. government to purchase the vehicles from General Motors, of which the federal government has a 61 percent ownership.
The Lansing State Journal published an editorial blasting the state of Michigan for forcing independent day care owners into a union — the subject of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation's lawsuit, Loar v. DHS. The piece begins:
If you received an unemployment check, do you think that qualifies you as a member of some kind of “unemployed union”? Would you expect the state, on your behalf, to deduct money from your payment to unionize you against some obscure agency that the state itself created?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a press release on March 29, indicating that "no stationary sources will be required to get Clean Air Act permits that cover greenhouse gases (GHGs) before January 2011." Regulating greenhouse gases is a top priority for the Obama administration. Cap-and-trade legislation stalled in the U.S. Senate primarily due to concerns that limiting energy production through controls on carbon dioxide emissions would lead to higher energy costs for households and businesses, further dragging down an already weak economy.
$6,876,303.90
$22.45
$0.00
The first figure is how much I was billed for the Michigan State Police to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the department's handling of the federal Homeland Security Grant program from its inception through September 2009:
Nearly every aspect of a teacher’s job falls under the rules of a union contract. The following is a synopsis of just one of those agreements in Michigan. It comes from Fruitport Community Schools near Muskegon, which employs 224 teachers and enrolls 3,200 students. Of its $32 million operating budget (excluding capital expenditures and debt services), 83 percent goes to pay employee compensation.
Over the weekend, the Obama administration announced 15 recess appointments, among them that of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, the five-member body that interprets and enforces federal labor law.
Becker’s appointment is problematic because his views are well outside of the mainstream of labor law. In a wide-ranging University of Minnesota Law Review article published in February 1993, Craig Becker distorted the notion of “industrial democracy” to an extent seldom seen even in academia.
(Editor's note: This article contains a correction to the version originally published. The decline in private-sector employees' compensation is now correctly stated as 5.1 percent.)
Spokespersons for Michigan government employee unions contend that they have given up hundreds of millions of dollars in wages and benefit concessions over the past few years. The claims are in dispute, and data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis offers some support for those challenging them. It shows that since 2000, government employee compensation in Michigan has increased 11.4 percent, while private sector employees are getting 5.1 percent less.
To make the state eligible for $400 million in federal "Race to the Top" grants, last December the Michigan Legislature passed a package of school reforms, one of which creates a state "school reform/redesign officer" and office in the Department of Education, with the authority to take over the management of 5 percent of the lowest achieving public schools statewide. The office would then implement one of four strategies specified in the RTTT guidelines: a "turnaround" model, a "restart" model, a "transformation" model or a "school closure" model.
