Following up on yesterday's report of possible corruption in Detroit Public Schools, The Detroit News reports on the arraignment of Ecorse's mayor and controller, who have been charged with conspiracy, bribery and fraud with regards to the city's public works contractor. The pair allegedly received at least $10,000 and a Lexus from the contractor, according to The News.
Do parents really want school choice? Ab-so-lutely. According to a Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency report titled “Explaining School Choice,” when given the ability to choose their children’s school, Michigan parents are exercising that choice at increasing rates.
The state is currently wrestling with how to close a budget for fiscal year 2010 that overspends revenues by $2.8 billion. Some of the proposed cuts to state spending are significant and debate over them may be holding up completion of the budget, which must be passed by midnight Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown.
The Michigan Senate has voted to keep the state wetlands program targeted by Gov. Jennifer Granholm for return to the federal government. The vote was along party lines with the Republicans voting to keep the program and the Democrats voting against the legislation. Once again, legislators from both parties have come to the wrong conclusion.
In an effort to help this state's political class bust out of its narrow conceptual box the Detroit News is running a "50 ideas to fix Michigan" feature, solicited from various entities that have a few. The Mackinac Center tried to provide ideas that no one else would offer, that represent not just "cuts" but genuine transformational reform in the way the state does business, and that truly "blow up the box" that constricts most conversations on state budget issues to a simplistic "cuts vs. tax hikes" formula. The first Mackinac Center idea highlighted by the News is one we first offered back in 2003, to save $65 million without reducing the number of law enforcement officers by devolving Michigan State Police road patrols to county sheriff deputies - something the Lansing budgeteers should have on the table this week as they struggle to craft a budget that "saves" the jobs of 105 troopers eliminated last spring.
USA Today cited a recent Mackinac Center study showing that just one-third of jobs promised by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. have come to fruition.
The article discussed the frenzy among various states to create more and more subsidy programs that take money from taxpayers and transfer it to particular companies making promises, particularly in the race to gain so-called green jobs.
Reason's Radley Balko notes that center-left publications including the The American Prospect and The New Republic (plus our own Blogging for Michigan) are "pushing the 'Tenther' smear, aimed at lumping those who, horrors!, still take seriously the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in with the Obama birth certificate deniers and 9/11 truthers."
Perhaps you’ve heard that a majority of members of Congress (or perhaps it’s just the House) have turned down amendments that would commit them to any sort of “public option” that they create. Such a jarring juxtaposition (some would say hypocrisy) is nothing new, of course. Rank has its privileges.
Cross-posted from State House Call
Kansas is a deep-red, Republican state that would have nothing to do with a government takeover of health care, right?
Not quite. Start with the fact that Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s secretary of health and human services, is a Democrat and former governor. Now, two agencies in the state government headed by her hand-picked successor have been helping a union that’s at the forefront of ObamaCare, until recently.
On Wednesday, a legislative conference committee re-wrote a budget proposal for the 2010 K-12 School Aid Fund in such a way that it would reduce the foundation allowance by $218 per student. If enacted, this will yield a total School Aid Fund savings of $346.4 million. The idea of cutting this much from the school budget was swiftly criticized by the governor's budget director, Bob Emerson, who predicted "mass layoffs" because under this proposal the "School Aid Fund isn't adequately funded."
Actually we don't know what they chanted, but MIRS News reported that that tourism-related business officials did demonstrate in front of the Capitol yesterday, protesting a proposed cut to the state's "Pure Michigan" advertising campaign.
Here's a concept for them: If ad campaigns like Pure Michigan are really such a success, why don't the hotels that benefit from this taxpayer largesse pay for it themselves? That the tourist industry's members refuse to do so speaks volumes about the program's real value.
The Detroit News today writes about a possible scandal regarding building construction and land purchases by Detroit Public Schools. The district paid more than $156.2 million for services it may have obtained for $15 million, according to The News. It underscores the importance of transparency.
Yesterday, I published the first part of this essay illustrating how an MEDC letter-to-the-editor responding to a critical Wall Street Journal editorial illustrates the agency's pattern of using illegitimate rhetorical devices to avoid responding to the substance of serious critiques, including distractions, irrelevancies and non sequiturs. Here is the second part of the essay, deconstructing other statements in MEDC CEO Greg Main's letter.
By Jack McHugh
As Michigan faces the potential for yet another budget debacle, frustrated citizens and pundits wonder if there aren't institutional reforms that might mitigate the apparent inability of our state's government establishment to solve long-festering dysfunctions. Things like a part time or unicameral legislature, biannual budgeting, etc.
An Op-Ed by the Center's James Hohman and Eric Imhoff in today's Detroit News highlights the millions of dollars public schools can save by privatizing noninstructional services.
Hohman and Imhoff recently completed the Center's 2009 school privatization survey, in which 100 percent of conventional public school districts cooperated by answering questions about privatized services and money saved.
Russ Harding, Mackinac Center senior environmental analyst, discussed cap-and-trade and other energy issues in Oakland County recently, according to Reporting Michigan.
Harding told the audience that such a plan would increase energy costs for homeowners by as much as $4,000 a year and suggested a better plan could include a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Cross-posted from State House Call.
It never ceases to amaze me how the busiest woman in Washington remains so accessible. Just this week alone, I am aware of 8-10 hours of direct Washington senior staff time devoted to Maine doctors, patients and health care professionals in reviewing the impact of the Baucus bill on Maine families and businesses.
Although the actual numbers are underreported, it’s now believed that up to one in six patients are being misdiagnosed under Britain’s government-run National Health Service.
While in most cases the misdiagnosis did not result in the patient suffering serious harm, a sizeable number of the millions of NHS patients were likely to suffer significant health problems as a result, according to figures. It was said that the number of misdiagnoses was “just the tip of the iceberg”, with many people still reluctant to report mistakes by their doctors.
“Insurance companies shouldn’t be able to discriminate!” makes for a great sound bite, but expensive insurance.
New York and a few other states have the kind of insurance regulations that President Obama and others call for. They’re called “community rating” (limits on how much an insurance company can “discriminate” by charging the sickest people more) and “guaranteed issue” (nobody can be turned down for a policy).
Medicaid is, for some states, an even bigger expense than education. That’s just one reason to try new reforms. The James Madison Institute highlights a pilot program enacted in Florida.
JMI president Bob McClure says: “Medicaid spending in Florida. It is absolutely unsustainable. … Continuing down this path, state government would not be able to fund core functions such as education and public safety without massive tax increases.”
Critics from the pro-spending, pro-government side of the ideological spectrum have famously been throwing the charge of “Astroturf” — i.e. fake “grass roots” — at the various TEA Party gatherings and town hall meetings that have been flaring up across the nation since April 15.
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has been critical of the Michigan Film Incentive since its inception in 2008. At first, the criticisms focused on the pure principle of the thing: state government has no business trying to pick corporate winners from losers in the marketplace. This time, the perceived “winner” would be moviemakers who could get cash refunds of up to 42 percent of money spent in Michigan. This also became the most generous film incentive in the country.
On Sept. 4, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “The Michigan Example,” excoriating the state’s reliance on government central planning to “create” jobs, rather than undertake genuine overall business climate reform. The editorial was based in part on research published a few days earlier by myself and James Hohman.
Confidence in government breeds complacency in politics. When people think government is handling things tolerably well, they see no reason to pay much attention to politics. When confidence sinks from low to lower, grass-roots political energy spikes upward. That’s why people are now leaping off the sidelines and into TEA parties and raucous town hall meetings to protest sky-high taxes, exploding deficits and the government’s attempt to take over health care. Smart politicians can seize this opportunity by exercising an oft-neglected part of the political anatomy: the spine.
Michigan law mandates that nearly all teachers pass the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification. The state claims these tests are “criterion referenced and objective based,” but reading through some of the sample questions provided on the MTTC Web site, I wonder how “objective” these tests really are. It’s well known that universities are disproportionately staffed with men and women of the left, but it’s still startling to find blatant ideological bias in state-mandated teacher certification tests.
