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Category Archives: Clear Taxing & Spending
Reform coalition gets money-saving win on prison boot camp
Michigan taxpayers saved more than $30 million per year under a deal reached Wednesday to keep a prison boot camp open near Chelsea.
Closing the camp would have added costs to the state budget because boot camp prisoners would have had to serve longer sentences in higher-security prisons despite recent data suggesting boot camp prisoners were [...]
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Arm wrestling over beers
It’s not exactly a bar brawl, but the president of the New Holland Brewing Company exchanged passionate messages this week regarding the Center’s recent newsletter post about the beer tax.
You might enjoy the discussion…
FROM BRETT VANDERKAMP, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF IMAGINATION OFFICER, NEW HOLLAND BREWING COMPANY:
First, I am not sure who crafted this blog, but I [...]
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Three 30,000-foot views on the budget
It is impossible to provide serious analysis of the extremely fluid and noisy state budget process in these late hours. But know this… we are watching the conference reports closely and eyeing many small details of how spending plans are out of line with the common ground budget priorities expressed around the state by the [...]
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Michigan brewers see pink elephants
There’s a great little brewery called Original Gravity in the little town of Milan, south of Ann Arbor, where I live. In one of those survivalist tales so common throughout Michigan, a former Big Three auto engineer chucked it all a while back and decided to serve his own beer for a living. The place [...]
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A "Turnaround Plan" for Michigan
In it’s reincarnation as Business Leaders for Michigan, the group formerly known as Detroit Renaissance has offered up a “Michigan Turnaround Plan” which combines reform notions pitched by many business groups with tax investment in future-oriented strategies like urban centers, mass transit, and higher education.
Specific to-do items in Doug Rothwell’s plan:
Reduce business taxes to make [...]
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Rival budget views are not mutually exclusive
A new billboard went up this week in Lansing at I-496 and Pennsylvania Avenue. Designed to be viewed by all public workers, media, and State Capitol denizens, the message is simple…
It’s interesting that this message from Michigan’s leading (and unified) business groups calls for “reforms” but not budget “cuts.” The business leaders are asking for [...]
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Four Prickly Questions
A few prods as we’re down to three weeks left in State Budget Circus II (the Sequel to ‘07)…
TO GOV. JENNIFER GRANHOLM: With one year to go in your tenure and no clear legacy in sight, why do you insist on playing small ball? Your budget plan this week, is a quilt of incremental patches [...]
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Kurt Metzger stops crunching numbers and speaks up
For many years, Kurt Metzger has served as Metro Detroit’s ace demographer. Journalist, public policy wonks, business executives, and politicians who need quick reads of the region’s pulse keep Kurt on speed dial.
This week, Kurt put down his spreadsheets and picked up his prose pen to contribute to the treasure trove of forward-thinkers who have [...]
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The BIG DEAL Lansing can strike
Let the hand-wringing begin. With just over a month before the October 1 deadline for an agreement on the state budget, here’s some inside dope on how it could all play out.
FIRST, THE BASICS… The state general fund budget, which pays for community colleges and universities, prisons, health care and other support programs for people [...]
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Punishing little kids
In the early 1960s, someone got the bright idea to split poor black children in Ypsilanti into two groups. One group got high-quality preschool education. The other group did not.
The results, more than 40 years later, are stunning. The lucky kids who got the pre-school program were far more likely to graduate from high school, [...]
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