If you drive around my hometown of Midland, Michigan this week, you’ll see a constant stream of utility workers. Many of them work for internet companies and are hard at work expanding services.
Charter and AT&T have both announced expansions of fiber internet. In the last two years, my bill with Charter declined by $20 per month while at the same time almost quadrupling in speed.
Early reports indicate that lawmakers have a deal to complete the state budget, and that it will include an end to the state’s largest business subsidy program. The state currently earmarks $500 million of the corporate income tax to the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve, which writes big checks to big companies. That earmark would end under the reported budget deal.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News Sept. 16, 2025.
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was sitting in my office in Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., when the second plane plowed into the World Trade Center in New York City. I called a friend and asked, “Are you okay?”
By Molly Macek
The House education budget proposal would give school districts more money with fewer strings and increase funding. So why are local school officials so sad about it?
The House budget, totaling $21.9 billion, would give school districts $100 million more in funding than the Senate’s or governor’s versions and a billion dollars more than schools get this year. And unlike the other proposals, it would roll up most of the categorical grants into the per-pupil foundation allowance.
Ohio public unions see 610 opt-outs
Public workers in the Buckeye State are leaving their unions in what Freedom Foundation calls a “tidal wave” of opt-outs. “More than 440 of those opt-outs came from employees tied to the Ohio Education Association (OEA) and the Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE) — unions long reliant on confusing fine print and arbitrary ‘opt-out windows’ to keep members trapped,” writes Ryan Horan. “What makes these numbers so impressive is the strategic outreach employed by the Freedom Foundation. Through a coordinated campaign including mailers, emails, digital ads and canvassing, we reached employees across the state, sending more than 200,000 pieces of content to Ohio public-sector employees in just two months.” [Emphases in original.]
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News Sept. 9, 2025.
Michigan’s State Board of Education has selected Glenn M. Maleyko to be the state’s next superintendent of public instruction. The superintendent serves as the principal executive officer of the Department of Education and is responsible for implementing the board’s policies. The role is so important that it’s spelled out in the state constitution.
The federal 340B program requires drug makers to sell their products to hospitals, which can then re-sell them and pocket the cash. It’s a case of the government picking winners (hospitals) and losers (drug manufacturers) among private market participants.
Early America lived by sabbath and blasphemy laws yet still maintained a separation between church and state.
Glenn Moots, a professor of political science and philosophy at Northwood University, tells the story of this deep religious influence on modern society.
Both Michigan and North Carolina have Democratic governors with Republicans controlling at least one branch of the legislature. In both states, there has been a budget fight between the different political bodies. The two states have close to the same population — about 10 million citizens in Michigan and 11 million in North Carolina.
Newly proposed legislation in Michigan would impose burdensome requirements on artificial intelligence systems. The predictable impact from these proposed laws would be to drive AI development out of the state, likely to China or other Asian economies.
Dear Members of the Union Township Planning Commission:
Union Township’s population is shrinking, as I pointed out in my previous article, “Paying People Not to Leave.” The township’s community and economic director, Rodney Nanney, acknowledged a decline when he spoke at the Aug. 19 Planning Commission meeting but tried to minimize its extent. The U.S. Census Bureau, he said, miscounted and misreported the 2020 census and subsequent estimates. But this false statement should not distract local officials from the township’s unfavorable situation.
Many readers may be aware that Attorney General Dana Nessel said in June that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation was stonewalling her department’s investigation into a $20 million state grant. The corporation has a long history of such tactics: Stonewalling. Foot-dragging. Delay tactics. Non-response responses. The Mackinac Center has endured the MEDC’s lack of transparency and accountability for decades.
There’s a lot for local school administrators to like in the budget the Michigan House passed in August. But they don’t seem to want to see it.
The House budget increases education spending in Michigan more than does the budget passed by the state Senate or the budget proposed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. At the same time, it eliminates a host of categorical grants (or “special programs”) that fund outside priorities such as special education, infrastructure spending, smaller class sizes, mental health and other areas. By transferring some of this money to the general education grant, the House budget lets school district officials figure out how they want to spend this money.
Kansas property owners get tax break under ‘revenue neutral’ law
A growing number of Kansas municipalities are opting to avoid raising property tax rates, and the Kansas Policy Institute credits a 2021 law that prevents municipalities from increasing rates without a thorough public process.
In 2022, former President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. The Board was formed to counter misinformation that might threaten national security.
It didn’t take long for people to compare the new board to the propagandistic Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian classic, “1984.” Biden scrapped the idea a few months later.
By Molly Macek
More than 60% of Michigan third graders, and nearly 58% of fourth graders, failed the 2025 state reading test – a greater proportion than last year. And all tested grades performed worse than they did just before the pandemic-era lockdowns.
State education leaders say funding and class size are to blame. But poor policy implementation and lack of school accountability are the more likely culprits.
Michigan’s current budget expires on Sept. 30, and lawmakers are working to come to an agreement to avoid a shutdown. Each year, the governor, state House and state Senate all propose their budgets for Michigan. K-12 education is the largest area of spending, so lawmakers usually negotiate funding for K-12 schools and then for everything else.
Dave Hebert, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, has seen a major shift in public opinion of the economics profession.
“Twelve years ago,” Hebert tells Michael Van Beek in this week’s Overton Window podcast, “the economist would walk into the room, and a chill would descend. It was not that we were truth-sayers or anything like that, but suddenly there was a sense that a serious contender for argumentation, for evidence, for logic has entered the scene. And we got some deference at some level. If you saw economists disagreeing about the outcomes, there was never really an impeachment of the person’s ideology or integrity.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News August 19, 2025.
Michigan taxpayers deserve to know how the state’s multibillion-dollar economic development enterprise is performing. Recent revelations about the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC) paint an alarming picture. Attorney General Dana Nessel just suggested that the state pause the corporation’s funding. We should go further. The attorney general is investigating a $20 million grant the MEDC gave to a politically connected businesswoman, Fay Beydoun.
Michigan’s pork barrel spending is out of control. Lawmakers have directed billions of dollars in recent years to politically connected groups, promoting political development, not economic development.
The latest deal is a lousy housing investment that is unlikely to lead to any economic growth. As uncovered by The Detroit News, a $15 million legislative earmark is being directed to Invest UP, an Upper Peninsula economic development organization. The group has never had an annual budget of more than $1.5 million — one tenth of the earmark.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News August 12, 2025.
College freshmen will stream on to campus later this month, trailed by proud but teary-eyed parents. Ask a first-year student what they are looking forward to most, as I did this week, and they might say meeting other students or listening to a well-known professor’s lectures or joining a club.
What if lawmakers fixed a problem and no one noticed? We don’t have to speculate. The political debate is filled with problems that were solved decades ago but that people don’t seem to have noticed. It leads to pandering and a lot of bad policy.
Consider this progressive call “to ensure corporate polluters are held accountable for the damage they do.” The United States fixed this in the 1970s when federal laws made companies liable for environmental harms. Fear of lawsuits has drastically changed industrial practice, and environmental measures have drastically improved over the past fifty years.
The Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which administers the state’s business subsidy programs, gets plenty of skepticism from policymakers these days. A House Oversight subcommittee on corporate subsidies and state investments has been hearing objections to the deals the state organization makes. Attorney General Dana Nessel is investigating the office over its involvement in a grant to a Democratic political supporter’s organization and has asked legislators to stop funding the group.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News August 4, 2025.
Three weeks ago, I offered seven questions people can ask to analyze policy ideas. Several readers told me the framework was helpful. Here are four more ideas for your policy analysis toolkit.
Michigan’s population has been stuck in the same spot for a generation, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to change that. Her population committee delivered a report and her growth office is handing out grants to do something to attract and keep more people in the state. It’s been two years since Whitmer created her task force, and it’s time for state officials to reassess their strategy. They should start by looking at the places around the country that are growing and notice that they are not the ones you might expect.
