Wars aren’t won by brilliant evacuations,” Phil Power writes this week. “Quite simply, we must develop a long-term proactive strategy for the survival and prosperity of Michigan, and then tailor both taxing and spending to that strategy. To understand why, look at any company. To survive, it may be necessary to cut costs. But merely cutting costs will not make a company thrive. To do that, it needs to identify its competitive assets, invest in them, and arrive at a strategy that uses those assets to bring new products to market and increase profitability.”
Michigan’s future strategy and and vision is increasingly focused by academics and common citizens alike.
John Austin, the Michigan State Board of Education vice president and Brookings Institution fellow, lays out a clear vision in a paper this month for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Austin’s vision includes leveraging the engineering side of Michigan’s car culture and our breadth and depth of university resources to help innovate in such areas future-oriented manufacturing, health care technology, biosciences, and environmentally friendly transportation. Likewise, Austin sees Michigan leveraging our natural beauty and water resources to attract long-term business growth.
Combine Austin’s thoughts with citizen calls for intensified education and a redefinition of Michigan’s public sector, and you pretty much match the recipe some 5,000 Michigan residents have conjured so far in the Michigan’s Defining Moment Public Engagement Campaign.
Execution is the bigger problem. Crain’s Detroit Business this week outlines five years of cogent reform proposals that have crashed on the rocky shoals of gridlock in Lansing.
“Michigan has plenty of reports showing what needs to be done,” Crain’s concluded. “We just don’t have leaders with the political will to do the job.”
It’s why we have for two years referred to 2010 as “Michigan’s Defining Moment.” We elect a new governor. We elect dozens of new legislators who will, in turn, elect new leaders in both chambers in the state capitol. We own this problem. And, we’ve got to get it right next year. No matter the party, we, as citizens, have to focus the candidates on key issues — educational attainment and affordability, economic diversification and business climate, and the scope and funding options for the public sector — that citizens are defining every week in Community Conversations across Michigan.
