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.
Is the union comeback finally here? Unions have been touting their supposed resurgence for decades, though actual union membership continues to decline. The union comeback remains unlikely, because unionization sows the seeds of failure in its own communities.
By Naomi Saneda
This year’s Michigan budget contains $1 billion in pork projects that are constitutionally suspect and do not promote the general welfare in the state. Politicians earmark state tax dollars for district-specific purposes, usually very late in the budgeting process and in opaque language designed to mask the nature of the spending.
Michigan is spending money at an unsustainable rate, and the state’s latest state budget shows why this can’t go on.
The state-funds budget for fiscal year 2024-25 is $46.8 billion, a 0.4% decline from the previous year. While this amount is below the Sustainable Michigan Budget level, it hides deeper problems threatening the state’s economic future.
The American people are taking part in a massive beta test of so-called green energy technology that is extremely buggy and unreliable, while infrastructure the public knows and trusts, including old-fashioned electricity, is increasingly devalued by leaders and activists.
A new federal court decision could fundamentally transform private sector labor law. In Space Exploration Technology Corporation v NLRB et al, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled Monday that the National Labor Relations Board, and by extension the National Labor Relations Act, were unconstitutional. While the case is not yet resolved and appeals are likely, the landscape of labor law could be forever changed should the ruling stand.
Interest groups winning protections from governments that cost the public is an old tale. They often follow the classic rule of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. Like bed bugs, they are difficult to get rid of once established. Difficult, but not impossible. I spoke with Alisdair Whitney, legal counsel at the Institute for Justice, about the institute’s success in repealing Certificate of Need laws in a number of states.
In 2019, Stephanie Wilson drove with Malcolm Smith to a house and then left. A police officer who was staking out the property as an alleged drug house followed the car and then pulled it over. A search found five empty syringes, but no drugs or other evidence. Police did not test the syringes.
This article originally appeared in the Detroit News July 23, 2024.
The Republican Party’s current flirtation with organized labor reminds me of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.
You remember that one: The scorpion wants to cross the river but cannot swim. He asks the frog for a ride. The frog worries the scorpion might sting him while crossing the river.
By Craig Orji
President Joe Biden unveiled a plan to lower housing costs. He recommends nationwide rent control, which is a well-documented way to make the housing market worse for everyone.
Biden’s plan seeks to curb rising housing costs by imposing a 5% cap on rent increases for landlords with over 50 units, while exempting new housing from this limit.
This article originally appeared in The Detroit News July 1, 2024.
Mike Pancio joined the U.S. Army seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was 25.
He trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and was an artillery instructor at Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi. He was promoted to the rank of technical sergeant. In September 1944, he boarded a ship overseas, attached to the 393rd Infantry Regiment.
This article originally appeared in the Detroit News July 17, 2024.
In January 2019, just weeks on the job, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer faced a crisis.
A polar vortex hit Michigan, with subzero temperatures and icy conditions. Then an accident threatened the power company’s natural gas supply. Whitmer held a press conference, followed by an emergency text alert, asking people to turn down their thermostats to avoid overwhelming the grid.
“Gov. Whitmer wins major economic deals” declared the Michigan Economic Development Corporation in a December 2022 press release. It described a “transformational investment” in Escanaba. State officials had found favor with a Swedish paper company’s plan to expand and awarded it a 15-year exemption from property taxes, worth nearly $30 million.
Some Michigan legislators have pursued laws that would allow cities across the state to establish rent control or subject rent approvals to a state board. The government could cap how much rent could increase.
The idea has some appeal. People are mad about high rental costs and want government to do something. So is rent control the answer? Anyone who thinks so should remember these words from the economist Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions — only trade-offs.”
Last year, 66.1% of students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year’s days. The number of chronically absent students went down slightly compared to the prior year, but it remains 22.2% higher than in the 2019-20 school year.
They do things different in other places. But they also do many things the same. Nepalese policy advocate Basanta Adhikari joins the Overton Window podcast to talk about how he got into advocacy and how his organization, Bikalpa-an Alternative, is changing minds and policy in his country. Many of the problems and tools for policy success ought to be familiar.
“Supreme Court Decision Threatens Clean Air and Clean Water for All,” said the Environmental Defense Fund in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 decision in the Loper Bright v. Raimondo case.
The Sierra Club decried the Loper Bright ruling for “gutting federal environmental protections,” predicting it “could send a ‘convulsive shock’ to decades of federal environmental, financial, and health-care regulations.”
Cutting hair, doing nails and working in skin care is about to get a lot more difficult in Michigan. A newly signed state law massively increases mandatory training hours for those going into these fields.
Cosmetology instructors are currently required to have 500 hours of training — this will increase by 20% to 600 hours. Manicurists now do 400 hours — this will increase by 50% to 600 hours. And estheticians will go from 400 hours of mandatory training to 750 hours; a nearly 90% increase.
The new state budget underfunds pensions and hands out pork. It reduces contributions into the pension system by $670 million and spends at least $702 million on district grants. Neither benefits the public.
Elected officials accidentally made school employees the state’s largest creditors. Lawmakers required teachers to participate in a state retirement system, but they didn’t set aside enough money to pay for their pensions. That’s unfair to teachers and taxpayers alike. It’s not like school workers volunteered to lend the state money. The state now owes teachers $29.9 billion more than has been saved. That’s more than the state owes the bondholders who willingly lent the state money.
A proposal to have taxpayers subsidize film companies to shoot in Michigan is in pre-production. House Bills 4907 and 4908 passed out of committee in the spring and are now on the House floor ready for deliberations. The bills would allow producers to pass 30% of their costs onto the public.
A bill to turn balloon releases into infractions is floating in the ether above the Michigan legislature. House Bill 4466, introduced in 2023, would classify “knowingly” releasing a balloon as littering and thus punishable as a civil infraction.
The legislation would serve as “an educational dissuasion tool,” Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said in 2023. McMorrow has supported similar legislation in the past.
Certificate of Need laws correlate with higher costs and “do not achieve their purpose,” according to a comprehensive new survey.
These laws, which require medical providers to get approval from the state in order to expand certain services, decreased access to medical care in 80% of case studies. Though supporters claim CON laws ensure access to medical care, only 7% of studies suggested a positive link.
Massive federal spending on internet construction will be delayed at least another year, Federal Communication Commissioner Brendan Carr recently announced.
“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans,” Carr tweeted in June. “Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds.”
“Are we making available to parents and families a wide range of educational options to students or restricting them to the government schools,” asks Mike Reitz, executive vice president of the Mackinac Center. “Since Covid, 20 states have expanded or created school choice programs, and Michigan is dragging at the back of the pack.”
