One of President Clinton's first actions was to propose an energy tax. This destructive tax proposal could be resurrected, but it is based on unsound economics and dubious science.
Our 97-year-old juvenile justice system sends the message to young criminals that the law has no teeth. Until young people are held responsible for their actions, the rebounding teen population will be accompanied by another surge in violent youth crime.
Some unions "salt" nonunion firms by forcing them to hire union sympathizers or even paid union organizers in an attempt to force them to unionize. This abuse means higher prices for consumers and loss of freedom for nonunion firms and their workers.
Are income tax cuts voodoo economics or an economic jump-start? History tells us what Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan learned when they slashed income taxes.
Michigan's Medicaid program has ballooned into a $4.5 billion giant. Medical savings accounts are a promising way to treat poor, disabled, and elderly people fairly and relieve Medicaid of the burden of providing long-term care for the middle class.
Everyone agrees that Michigan's crumbling roads need to be fixed. The state needs to make road repair a higher priority, continue recent cost-saving and efficiency measures, and adopt other recommendations that apply market forces and sound economics to road funding.
In Michigan, the same constitution that reads the "means of education shall forever be encouraged" is also the nation's strictest in forcing parents who choose an alternative to the public school system to pay twice for education. A tuition tax credit plan would provide some relief and address some of the flaws of a voucher system.
Two addictions eating away at American life are drugs and government. A remarkably successful Muskegon organization fights drugs without a dime of taxpayers' money and helps kick both bad habits.
Michigan leads the nation in tart cherry production. Some producers are lobbying the government to limit future production. Artificial controls on cherry production will retard development of new cherry markets and products essential to the industry's growth.
Historians usually give high marks to American presidents who expand the frontiers of government. Democratic President Grover Cleveland worked tirelessly to limit government and expand individual liberty in the late 1800s. Could he win election today with that philosophy?
Henry Ford's automobile helped Michigan change the world. Without government assistance or mandates, he doubled workers' wages and reduced their hours. The result was lower cost and better quality for Ford and consumers.
Michigan's lighthouses are sadly deteriorating under government ownership, but the law prohibits their sale to private owners. A policy of selling the lighthouses to those who have an incentive to preserve them could save these fascinating pieces of Michigan history.
Government consumes 41 percent of personal income-an indication that ours is an increasingly political society. Restoring civil society means seeking more to solve our own problems and looking less to government.
States are battling one another with arsenals of corporate welfare that use public money to attract select new factories and businesses. These counterproductive and discriminatory incentive programs should be replaced by more broad-based tax cuts and government reforms.
Most people think government should do some things, but not every thing. Expanding government programs for things like "job creation" and "economic development" blurs the line between public and private.
Legislation to create tax-levying "cultural districts" would make art more of a political decision and less of a personal one. The arts can and should be supported privately, as increasingly demonstrated by Lansing's WKAR public television and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
A plan to allow electric power competition in Michigan will lower the cost of manufactured goods for businesses. The plan should be extended to all electricity consumers, including residential.
County government innovations in Michigan's second-largest county are saving money and improving public services for more than 1.1 million residents.
Almost every duty of local government has now been privatized, somewhere in Michigan. Privatization is emerging as a bipartisan, good-government initiative. Communities can benefit by merely considering the privatization option.
Management of Detroit public housing is a disaster for residents, neighbors, taxpayers, and city officials. Private management of public housing has improved conditions for residents in other major cities.
Kids Hope USA links church volunteers with at-risk public school students. The program is a proven alternative to government programs which offer a distant and artificial substitute for real compassion.
Export subsidies are an example of corporate welfare that benefits a few at the expense of the many. Well over 99 percent of Michigan exports are made without the help of this special favors program.
Shocking juvenile violent crime trends will not reverse until local communities are given wider latitude to ensure certainty of punishment and other deterrents to criminal behavior.
Michigan land owners receive no compensation if the government causes partial, but not total, devaluation of their property. Other states have adopted fairer compensation laws that Michigan should consider.
Alternative fuel subsidies and mandates distort the market signals that help make new technologies successful in the first place.
Burdensome rules on government grants to a Detroit church divert resources from helping people to satisfying bureaucrats. Government should encourage more private giving, not try to replace it.
Michigan black inventor Elijah McCoy's 52 patents helped the trains run efficiently and on time. The market rewarded his brilliant ideas and helped him overcome racial discrimination.
"Free people are not equal and equal people are not free," is a profound truth that politicians forget when they try to force economic equality through punitive taxes and restrictions. Michigan's former inheritance and intangibles taxes are examples.
The Salvation Army has been waging war on poverty since long before the government declared its own war on poverty thirty years ago. A new city of Detroit ordinance makes it more difficult for the Salvation Army to help hungry and homeless people at its twenty Detroit shelters.
Is the hiring of workers to replace striking employees a moral decision, a business concern, or both? A look at the inherent rights of workers and freedom of contract resolves the matter easily.
Some consider freedom of choice a serious threat to organized labor. Michigan law denies many workers the right to choose whether or not to support a labor union. The twenty-one states which guarantee this freedom to choose through right-to-work laws also enjoy greater economic growth, job creation, and real wages.
If welfare as a government entitlement ends, private institutions will play a larger role in helping needy people. Detroit's Capuchin Soup Kitchen is an excellent example of meeting needs through private, voluntary cooperation.
When a customer is sued by a former supplier because the customer found a better bargain with another company, whose side does the law tend to support? A Michigan firm finds itself in this situation.
If state employees are underpaid, it is not because they are paid less than private-sector workers. The documented wage and benefit gap between Michigan's private and public sector is significant and growing.
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects our homes against unreasonable searches. A Kalamazoo city rental inspection ordinance runs afoul of this provision, and helps create an unusual alliance.
Some Michigan welfare recipients make the only logical economic choice when they stay on welfare rather than find work that pays even $9 per hour.
When firms compete, costs tend to go down and product quality tends to rise. When regulators enter the marketplace, operating under a different set of incentives, price and quality trends tend to work against the consumer.
American education is still burdened by the thing that caused the economies of Eastern Europe to disintegrate-central planning that all but obliterates individual initiative and accountability. Private-practice teaching is an innovation that gives teachers more freedom and incentive; provides administrators more flexibility and cost savings; and allows more choice and improved education to students.
A Michigan statute that protects lawyers from competition contributes to sky-high attorney fees that burden the average consumer and prevents many poor people from affording simple legal services.
An initiative to provide Michigan public school students and parents greater choice in school selection would benefit students and schools. Opponents of school choice defend the existing system and status quo, and find themselves opposing freedom instead of helping to make it work.
When government construction projects do not even accept bids from nonunion firms, the taxpayers pay more and nonunion workers are denied employment opportunities.
Most Medicare, Medicaid, and other health care reform plans seek to manipulate health care need. Another proposal, medical savings accounts, would encourage injury and illness prevention and would help save Americans $200 billion annually.
Michigan highway financing goes through "binge" and "bust" cycles that allow roads to deteriorate before new monies are raised. Modern technology may make possible a more equitable and cost-effective "pay-as-you-go" system.
Environmental problems exist, but some Michigan textbooks make exaggerated claims and teach children that the world is near destruction. Twisting facts is bad enough, but it may be worse to subject our children to unfounded fears and pressure to save the planet.
The laws uncovered by the Mackinac Center's Outrageous Law Competition will make you chuckle. Underlying them are two serious lessons which teach us about government's response to crises and the role of special interests.
About 20 percent of Michigan's goods and services are exported to Mexico. That country's recent currency crisis was met with a U.S.-backed bailout. The federal government could do Michigan a favor by getting its own house in order, and not throwing U.S. taxpayers' money at Mexico's failed policies
Farm subsidies drive up food prices for the poor and subsidize many millionaire farmers. The problem seems intractable today, but exactly 100 years ago a Michigan man mustered the integrity and courage to deal with this very issue.
Michigan is winning the battle to control its workers' compensation costs. It is time to celebrate that success, and take the next steps for improvement. Progress can still be made in getting the injured back to work and screening out dubious claims.
Michigan's no fault auto insurance is among the most expensive in the country. Allegations of price gouging by insurance companies make headlines while a far more likely culprit is costly state mandates.
