By Jack McHugh
The 100th Michigan Legislature completed its 2019 business and will commence its second year of regular sessions on Wednesday Jan. 8. The next Roll Call Report will be posted on Jan. 10. This report recaps the 2019 legislature’s volume of activity.
Since 2001 MichiganVotes.org has provided concise, objective and plain-English descriptions of every bill, amendment and vote introduced or taken in the Michigan legislature.
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Detroit News on December 15, 2019.
According to a recent estimate, there are more than 3,100 criminal acts defined in Michigan statutes, and lawmakers add dozens more every year, on average. No person could keep track of all these offenses, leaving citizens unsure if their behavior is potentially criminal or not: This is the problem of overcriminalization. A package of bills being considered in Lansing provides a perfect example of both how this problem develops, and the dangers of lawmakers creating so many crimes.
Michigan will end 2019 with some great news: State lawmakers didn’t re-up the audaciously named “Good Jobs for Michigan” corporate handout program. The state will not be able to give away new deals for taxpayer cash to companies through this program starting in 2020.
On Jan. 1 the Mackinac Center’s Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative posted and distributed its first policy recommendations of the year. The essay was titled “2019 State Budget: Cut Corporate Welfare for Roads and Economic Growth,” and it described the shortcomings of the state’s subsidy programs and how money now dedicated to them might be better spent.
By Jack McHugh
Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana through a ballot proposal last year, and labor unions are seeing green. Big Labor and its allies are trying to use state regulations to grow union revenue.
After Michigan became a right-to-work state in 2013, most its largest unions have seen big declines in membership and revenue. State law and U.S. Supreme Court decisions have rendered it illegal for unions to force workers to pay them money in order to hold a job. This has freed hundreds of thousands of teachers, auto workers, day care employees, state workers, home caregivers and more.
By Ben DeGrow
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Tuesday announcement that she would sign the supplemental school aid bill signals the end to a lengthy appropriations debate, finally wrapping up more than two months into the fiscal year. The prolonged drama could easily obscure the final result, which is well within the trend of increased state spending on education.
Six years ago I criticized a chart that President Obama published about job growth. It implied that he was single-handedly responsible for ending the Great Recession. In presenting the same information in a slightly different manner, the data suggested that the recession continued to intensify for months after the president took office. It’s worth a second look with new data and a new administration.
By Jack McHugh
Last week, the Mackinac Center published a study about the problem of letting administrative agencies define criminal behavior. This happens when the state Legislature empowers a state department to write legally binding rules to execute a statute and then declares that anyone violating the statute or these rules is guilty of a crime. In effect, then, unelected bureaucrats in these agencies can determine what constitutes criminal behavior.
By Ben DeGrow
(Editor's Note: This is the third in a series of articles featuring the perspectives of current and recent Michigan public school teachers’ experiences with school choice. See the first two articles here and here.)
Meeting Amy Dunlap now, it’s hard to imagine. But in the early part of this decade the energetic and passionate young woman was ready to give up on her teaching career. From defiant, disruptive students to uncooperative colleagues, her classroom experience had become far more frustrating than fulfilling. “You start to rethink why you went into the profession,” she said.
Counselors, insurance agents, cosmetologists and athletic trainers are all set to more freely practice their jobs under bills recently passed or expected to move soon in Michigan. These are all good steps toward reducing unnecessary regulation, but they also show the need for more comprehensive licensing changes.
By Jack McHugh
By Jason Hayes
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Hill on November 2, 2019.
President Trump's offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark was front-page news in August, but a better option for expanding the country’s geographic footprint would be to offer statehood to the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as the interior of British Columbia.
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Hill on October 26, 2019.
Young people extolling socialism have caused conservatives to sound alarms about the direction the country is going. But the reappearance of socialism is more a sign of a wide partisan divide than it is evidence that people want to change America’s economic system.
By Jack McHugh
Legislators are considering bills to expand tax preferences to a small number of businesses, exempting them from taxes that other, similarly situated businesses pay.
House Bills 5127 and 5128 would extend existing sales and use tax exemptions by 20 years and apply them to a limited number of businesses in a specific industry. These exemptions would only apply to data center companies — businesses that store websites for other companies and provide them with other information technology services — that spend $250 million or more on buildings and equipment. It would not apply to businesses in the same industry that have spent less.
By Ben DeGrow
A recent MLive article claimed to offer “Everything you need to know about Michigan’s charter schools.” It didn’t do that, and worse, offered faulty data that leads readers to see charters in a more negative light than they deserve.
MLive should get credit for featuring some accurate information about charters – namely, that they serve greater shares of low-income and African American children than their counterparts in district schools. It also mentions, correctly, that charters are more commonly located in the metro Detroit area. But the story omits key basic facts about public school academies (the state’s legal name for charter schools). Chief among the omissions may be this: They only exist because parents have sought them out as favorable alternatives to their default education options.
By Ben DeGrow
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Detroit News on November 9, 2019.
Michigan’s automakers helped shape our world by empowering untold millions to take the wheel and more easily reach their chosen destinations. Today, some of the state’s most disadvantaged children could use a similar boost to better fulfill their educational goals.
By Jason Hayes
Editor's Note: This piece was first published in the Lansing State Journal on November 6, 2019.
The Line 5 debate in Michigan has put increasing pressure on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel to support both labor and environmentalists. Unfortunately, the two interest groups aren’t always easy to reconcile, and Whitmer and her administration appear to have chosen her green allies over the blue-collar workers in this state.
By Jack McHugh
By Ben DeGrow
Editor's Note: This piece first appeared in the Washington Examiner on October 13, 2019.
Imagine a student taking a standardized test and being so over unprepared to answer multiple choice questions that he just flips a coin or rolls a dice to make his choice — just randomly guessing on every question for the whole test. Seems absurd, but based on the test results for the public school district in Detroit, the average student might as well be doing so.
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Hill on October 17, 2019.
New York state briefly banned flavored vaping products in September, only to have that ban stayed by a court of the New York State Appellate Division days later. The state Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on the stay on Friday. The ban, and those considered in other states, should not take effect. America has experience with prohibiting popular products — alcohol comes to mind — and making others prohibitively expensive, such as cigarettes. The results should serve as a warning signal to all policymakers.
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Hill on October 12, 2019.
RecoveryPark is a 501(c)3 enterprise that seeks to transform an abandoned area of Detroit — and abandoned Detroiters — through urban agriculture. Its first phase supplies fresh, locally grown specialty produce grown in high tunnel greenhouses to about 130 restaurants in the Detroit area.
In an attempt to get Republican legislators to vote for a tax increase, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed roughly $1 billion in spending. It was an attempt to apply pressure on her opposition. But it turns out that most items in the budget aren’t very partisan.
