By Jason Hayes
If Michigan legislators pass Senate Bill 275, the bill’s new “low carbon fuel standard” will increase costs for drivers by $350 per person annually. Our new report, Low Carbon, High Costs: How a Clean Fuel Standard Would Increase Gas Prices and Living Costs in Michigan, shows how the standard will impact the statewide economy, provide almost no environmental benefit, and enrich rent-seeking businesses rather than helping the people of Michigan.
American government is at its best when lawmakers debate policies to benefit the public. Elected officials, though they have different views and ideas, can come together to put the general interests of the public first and foremost. The government exists for the people and to serve the people, all 336 million of them.
When I was 25 years old, I was married with a newborn and a total annual household income of less than $35,000 (or $48,000 in 2024). But my wife and I managed to pay monthly college loans, cover our expenses, tithe and save and invest more than 25% of our money. And in the years since, we’ve never spent even half our income on essential living expenses (housing, food, transportation, technology, etc.).
On the Overton Window podcast, Angela Erickson, vice president of research at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and former senior research director at Pacific Legal Foundation, talks about the critical role of project management in the legislative fight against home equity theft. This issue affects homeowners across the United States, with devastating consequences for those who fall behind on their property taxes. Erickson gained a thorough understanding of the problem while leading a successful fight against home equity theft at Pacific Legal Foundation.
In 2012, Michigan citizens were getting set to vote on a constitutional amendment that would have enshrined the forced unionization of home caregivers into the state constitution. This ballot proposal was bankrolled by SEIU Healthcare Michigan, which had been skimming $6 million per year from caregivers and was set to do so again.
The country has fully recovered the jobs it lost during the pandemic and has been steadily growing in recent months. Michigan, meanwhile, is still falling behind.
Michigan’s added 39,000 jobs since February 2020, a 0.9% gain. That’s well below the 4.2% national average. Michigan is ranked 40th in job growth. Jobs in Idaho, the fastest growing state by this measure, are up by 12.9%.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News September 10, 2024.
The movie “Reagan” contains a scene from Ronald Reagan’s boyhood. He's seen running from three other boys, into his yard and up on the front porch where his mother meets him. The three bullies fall back, lurking down by the street.
Michigan lawmakers appear likely to pass legislation that would worsen shortages and hamper emergency response. House Bills 5895, 5896, and 5897, introduced in July by Reps. Laurie Pohutsky, D-Livonia, and Jason Hoskins, D-Southfield, accompany similar Senate legislation that aims to prevent businesses from “excessively” raising prices on essential products such as energy, lodging, or food and drinks during emergencies.
You might see trouble when you look at power outages, declining birth rates and exorbitant grocery prices. Intellectuals and environmentalists, however, see something so wonderful that they had to create a word for it: Degrowth.
In the 2014 book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, a collection of European thinkers presented an ideological movement that aimed to overturn the “growth paradigm” and usher in “an economy of common feast for all sober individuals.” The movement relies heavily on arcane and fustian terminology such as “dépense,” “nowtopian,” “dematerialization,” “economic disobedience,” “post-normal science,” and the use of “imaginary” as a noun, while “degrowth” itself comes from the French coinage “décroissance.”
There is no such thing as price gouging. During crises, we see price signals that help allocate scarce resources to those who need them most.
But some Michigan lawmakers are proposing new laws to prevent "price gouging" during emergencies, an approach that misinterprets how markets work. Suppressing these signals, as the proposed laws intend, will result in shortages and ultimately harm consumers.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News September 4, 2024.
Sixty percent of Michigan’s third-graders just failed the state’s reading test. Last week the state Department of Education released the results of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP). The results showed that only 39.6% of third-graders were rated proficient or above in the English Language Arts portion — a 10-year low. What’s more shocking is the collective shrug from political leaders and school officials.
People should notice that the candidates running to represent them are not promising to do much. More than in the past, this election doesn’t seem to be about policy. Yet candidates are taking tough stances. Interest groups have gotten candidates to state their views on the issues that interest groups care about. And voters will never be told how much their candidates have deferred their judgment to special interests.
Michigan’s long-delayed distribution of federal funds for promoting internet access is likely to be delayed again. Congress in its 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act economic stimulus legislation authorized more than $42 billion in federal funding for increasing internet access, of which $1.5 billion was allocated to Michigan. So far, not a single Michigan household or business has been connected to the internet as a result of the program.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News August 30, 2024.
Adrian Montague and James Shuttleworth believe that $5 can change the world.
And if you’re going to change the world, why not start with an overlooked and much-maligned city like Flint?
Governments at the local, state and federal levels run a vast number of anti-poverty programs, but poverty rates remain high. The two political parties rarely consider solutions that do not involve spending more public money. Our leaders would be better off eliminating barriers to work rather than fussing over finances, according to Josh Bandoch, head of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute.
The European Union’s process-based regulations on genetically modified organisms might seem to stem from a reasonable concern for public safety. Special interests and regulators have pointed to the supposedly unnatural process of genetic modification since GMOs began to see widespread use in the early 1990s. They warn about the potential or unknown risks of genetically modified foods and claim these organisms damage the natural environment. Activists also predict economic harm as farms consolidate and small farmers get squeezed out.
There’s an adage that whatever you tax more, you get less of. Michigan is learning this lesson the hard way as strong income earners flee the state.
The financial information website SmartAsset last week published the results of its 2024 study, “Where High-Earning Households Are Moving.” Spoiler alert: they’re not moving to Michigan.
America’s adversarial political process is supposed to produce good results. The candidates offer different opinions, visions and proposals. The person with the most compelling ideas wins office and gets to enact his or her agenda.
Yet this is not how the political debate is working. Instead, candidates take advantage of a quirk in the adversarial process. Politicians don’t need to have the best ideas and most persuasive points. Candidates can also win if voters think it is unfathomable to vote for the person on the other side.
Workers deserve the right to choose who best represents them in the workplace. This Labor Day, public sector workers are on the verge of being able to make that choice for the first time in decades.
For years, unions have denied dissenting workers the right to completely dissociate from union representation. Workers who would prefer to have nothing to do with the union are still forced to accept the contract it negotiates with their employer. This problem results from a principle of labor law known as exclusive representation.
Academic economists have useful ideas about how to make the world better off. The papers they write are important but aren’t going to make the best seller list. Nor are they targeted at persuading enough people to generate the political popularity necessary for legislative change. This is where the economist Bryan Caplan steps in. His latest book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, provides a more accessible take on the subject and puts it into a graphic novel. I discuss this work with him on the Overton Window podcast.
A reader took the time to send a respectful response to the recent Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Jason Hayes and I discussed our new report on the threat to grid reliability in seven Great Lakes states.
This reader wrote:
You raise some interesting points. One clear solution is more storage. Renewable sources such as wind and solar often produce peak power at the wrong time of the day. Storage choices will expand over the next five to ten years and the cost will decline.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is calling on Michigan residents to report “misleading or inaccurate information regarding voting or elections” to her office. According to the secretary, “Voters have a responsibility to proactively seek out reliable sources of information and encourage productive and honest dialogue.”
Governments regulate many occupations. Everyone knows doctors and lawyers need a license to practice. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many lower-profile jobs require licenses that do not provide much benefit to the public. Michigan regulates nearly 50 low-income occupations, such as shampooers, manicurists, milk samplers and door repair contractors.
Republicans tend to support school choice and Democrats tend to oppose it. That’s why there’s been a rush of red states to approve scholarships for K-12 students. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has been a state with mixed partisan control and has a number of school choice programs. I speak about it with Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation, for the Overton Window podcast.
