Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Taxing Patience - 11/30/07

I was genuinely puzzled this week as the days dragged on and the legislature failed to step up and get this deal done.

Then I finally figured out why.

First, to recap both houses voted earlier this month to repeal the bizarre, much-disliked tax on a strange assortment of services.

To prevent that tax from taking effect, they had to repeal it no later than today, since it is scheduled to take effect at midnight. All they needed to do is iron out the differences between the two bills.

Republicans and Democrats alike agreed they needed to do this. They also agree, if reluctantly, that the only way to replace that revenue is to increase the new Michigan Business Tax, which itself doesn’t take effect until New Year’s Day.

Actually, the smarter and more honest of the legislators know perfectly well that increasing the state income tax, at least temporarily, would make more sense fiscally and otherwise.

But that’s not going to happen because the lawmakers lack the courage and the political will to raise income taxes again.

So, they need to finish the job. Yet here we are, ten hours before deadline, and they still haven’t stopped the train.

That’s even more baffling when you consider that last week a new EPIC-MRA poll showed that eighty-three percent of Michigan citizens have a totally negative view of the job the legislature is doing. I have never seen poll numbers that bad in my life, for anybody.

You would think ratings that bad would be a powerful incentive for both parties to get their act together.

But it clearly wasn’t, and here’s why. You may not want to hear this, but most of them don’t care what you think or what you want.

They don‘t care very much, anyway. Oh, they don‘t want to be removed from office, which is what a recall election would do. That actually has prevented some of them from doing the right thing.

And some of them want to be elected to other offices when term limits force them to leave their current jobs in a few years.

But right now, you aren’t who they are working for.

They are thinking about their next jobs, which in many cases won’t even be in politics. That’s another of the many disastrous effects term limits have had on our state.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop can’t run for another term. He will need a job, however; he is a young man with young children.

His background is in real estate; he has positioned himself as the champion of business. He needs to demonstrate to them that he’ll go to the mat for their interests, not yours.

He is far from alone. Thirty of his thirty-seven colleagues also can’t run again. Neither can forty-four house members, all of whom will be out of a job in a little over a year.

Their eyes aren’t on our long-term future. Which is why those of us who live here, and who want a future, are in trouble.

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Interview: Jeanne Englehart - 11/30/07

At the beginning of this week, it looked like a repeal of the service tax was a done deal. Both houses of the legislature had passed bills doing away with it. But once again, political bickering has gotten in the way…and, as of now, the tax will go into effect tomorrow. Jeanne Englehart is the President and C-E-O of the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her about how local businesses are preparing for the tax.

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Essay: Housing Crisis - 11/29/07

Much of the time, when I see the presidential candidates squabbling on stage, I have a strong feeling that they are in a different world from the rest of us, and that none of them get it.

I have the same feeling every time I get a press release from one of the intellectual munchkins in the Michigan legislature.

All these people are in some kind of alternate reality universe. I talked to a Democratic legislator in Lansing last night who sounded like a six-year-old, triumphantly telling me they had sent their service tax bill over to the state senate and gone home.

“So they are stuck with our bill.” I got home to find a similar juvenile e-mail from the Republican senate leadership. “This is our final offer,” they said. As we have learned this year, our elected lawmakers of both parties seem incapable of doing their jobs.

And, the politicians on the national stage are worse. They live in a wonderland where they think most people are deeply concerned over whether Mitt Romney unwittingly employed illegal immigrants to work at the Massachusetts governor’s mansion. There was also a gripping exchange last night as to who paid for the security detail that guarded Rudy Giuliani when he was courting his current wife.

I can tell you that nobody in my neighborhood cares about any of that, from the pathologist on the corner to the waitresses in our nearby coffee shop. What they care about is their houses.

I live in a tiny little enclave city of six thousand people where, a decade ago, you seldom saw a “for sale” sign. The houses were mainly sold through word of mouth. Today there are three or four houses on my block that have had for sale signs up for months and one actually in foreclosure. The building inspector told me nobody could remember when a house here was in foreclosure before.

My house has officially declined in value. And elsewhere in Michigan it is worse. Much worse. The Detroit News did a frightening piece of excellent journalism about this earlier this week.

They calculated that more than 70,000 homes in the metropolitan area have entered foreclosure during the last two years. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, the cost has been at least $1.6 billion dollars. That’s a combination of lost values, assets and property taxes. And it’s going to get worse.

There are still a lot of adjustable rate mortgages that are soon going to balloon to higher rates, and many of their owners aren’t going to be able to pay. In 1980, we started electing leaders who told us the path to heaven was an unregulated free market. If you want to see the result, take a look at the airline or the mortgage industry. When I turned off my TV last night, the candidates were squabbling about whether Iraq was Munich or Vietnam.

What I want to know is how to avoid another Great Depression. Because there isn’t another FDR anywhere in sight.

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Interview: Dana Johnson - 11/29/07

The University of Michigan’s annual economic forecast calls for a rough year ahead… but then sees an economic rebound beginning in 2009. But, a new study of the foreclosure crisis suggests that for many people things could get much worse before they get any better. Dana Johnson is vice president and chief economist at Comerica Bank. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

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Essay: Primary Concerns - 11/28/07

A week ago, the Michigan Supreme Court reinstated our presidential primary in what may have been the most bizarre and narrowly partisan ruling in any court since Bush v. Gore.

Two lower courts had ruled the primary unconstitutional. That‘s because it will use our money to create lists of the people who vote and what party they voted for, and then supply the parties with those names. Not only that, nobody else gets access to these lists, not journalists, not the general public even though they are being created by our tax dollars. What if you value your privacy and don’t want anyone to know you voted in the Democratic primary?

Tough, baby. Four Republicans on our state’s highest court said you don’t have any right to keep your party choice private.

Three other judges sharply disagreed. “The very idea of supplying lists of voters to private parties, when the voters must either be on the list or not vote, strikes me as an abuse of the elective franchise,” Justice Michael Cavanagh wrote. He was joined in dissent by Marilyn Kelly, his fellow Democrat on the court, and Elizabeth Weaver, the court’s one independent-minded Republican.

But the court has a majority bloc of four Republican justices who almost always vote alike Cliff Taylor, Stephen Markman, Maura Corrigan and Robert Young. They knew that the state GOP wanted this primary, and so they ruled it was just fine.

“The states’ interest permits them to enact reasonable election regulations that may in fact favor the traditional two-party system,” the wrote. Well, so much for that. Trouble is, we really only have half a primary. Most of the Democrats aren’t on the ballot and the national committee is set to take the party’s convention delegates away.

That’s because Michigan broke the rules by having a primary before February 5th So what were Jennifer Granholm and Debbie Dingell really thinking? They believe that Hillary Clinton is going to easily win their nomination; that the convention will be more like a coronation, and that her forces will quietly restore our convention delegates.

Wouldn’t it be something then, if this state’s considerable anti-war forces put together a stealth campaign to give Dennis Kucinich a surprise showing? That’s exactly the kind of thing Michigan Democrats are quite capable of doing. After all, they shocked the nation by voting for Jesse Jackson in 1988.

As for me, now that the Supreme Court has said my party preference can no longer be secret, I plan to vote in the Republican primary. I get plenty of left-wing political junk mail now. It might be interesting to get more of the right-wing stuff, once I am added to their lists. I haven‘t quite decided which candidate to vote for, though I am leaning towards writing in some name that will give them fits.

What I do know, however, is how I will vote for Supreme Court next fall, when Cliff Taylor is up for re-election. I hope you do too.

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Interview: Rick Pluta - 11/28/07

Michigan’s off-again, on-again January 15th presidential primary now seems finally on, after two days of bizarre moves by the legislature. Or, at least for the Republicans; most of the Democratic candidates aren‘t participating. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rick Pluta who is the Michigan Public Radio Lansing Bureau Chief about what is going on with the primary.

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Essay: Winter Wonderland - 11/27/07

Based on everything we’ve seen over the last year, it might be hard to believe that the Michigan legislature could successfully order paper towels for their washrooms. Nevertheless, pressure is starting to build to pass some kind of package protecting our water resources.

I’m not sure whether this has been spurred by increasing environmental consciousness. I think the specter of Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Richardson talking about “diverting” water from the Great Lakes to his native Southwest shook up a lot of people.

Richardson soon took it back, but was this the first sign that the wolves are beginning to circle the campfire? 

The Great Lakes states lose clout in Congress with every new census, and the water-hungry Southwest gains.

So if there was ever a time to do something to protect our waters, this is it. If we blow this opportunity, we may not have any others.  Some of us are obsessed with nightmare visions of cowboys draining our lakes to water their cattle on the drive to Abilene.

In fact, we need to do everything we can to stop any diversion of the lakes.

But we are also quite capable of ruining our water supply without any outside help. The water levels this summer have been close to record lows. And yet the senate bills would do nothing to slow the rate of water diversion from the Great Lakes, and may well threaten our streams. Yes, there are scientists who say that pumping two million gallons a day won’t affect the lake levels.

There were also 19th century naturalists who said not to worry about the millions of passenger pigeons hunters were shooting. They blanketed the skies and there would always be more ... at least until the last one died in 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo.  We can live, if slightly diminished, without the pigeon. We can’t live at all without the fresh water of the Great Lakes.

Politics is the art of compromise, and there are a vast range of issues on which we can live with compromise solutions, from school funding to the kinds of taxes we enact.

But there are a few issues on which we can’t compromise. You can’t have a limited nuclear war. Our water supply is already deeply stressed. Our waters are filled with invasive species.

Now we have water bottlers happily trucking hundreds of millions of gallons of water away. We need to put the water supply off limits to any kind of risky exploitation. We need to treat the Great Lakes and the waters of this state more gingerly than we would a national park. They are sacred, and our lives depend on them.

What I worry is that our lawmakers will pass some sort of watered-down compromise that will leave us thinking our water is protected, when it really isn’t. Nor can we leave this to the legislators, even the best intentioned ones. Eternal vigilance is supposedly the price of freedom. In our case, it may well be the price of clean water as well.

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Interview: Rebekah Warren - 11/27/07

Protecting Michigan’s fresh water supply has become a popular and bipartisan cause. Republican Patty Birkholz has introduced one package of bills in the state Senate. While Representative Rebekah Warren is the main sponsor of a different package of bills which are before the state House. Represenative Warren thinks her bills would provide the Great Lakes with stronger protection than the Senate plan. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with Representative Warren from the House floor.

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Essay: Holding Water - 11/27/07

State Senator Patty Birkholz deserves a great deal of credit for pushing this state towards an overdue ratification of the Great Lakes compact. Two years ago, the governors of the eight states that surround the lakes signed this agreement, as did the premiers of Ontario and Quebec. The compact may not be perfect.

But it is designed to protect the lakes, the world’s largest source of fresh water, from being drained for use elsewhere. The director of Ohio’s department of natural resources called it “a commitment to protect a resource in the face of climate change.”

The compact can’t take effect, however, until it is approved by the legislatures of all eight states, and then ratified by Congress. So far, only two states have done so. Michigan needs to be the third.

Given the makeup of the state legislature, it makes sense that the initiative to do so should come from the GOP-controlled Senate.

Yet the bills she has introduced to ratify the compact also would permit what many think would be dangerously high water withdrawals from Michigan rivers and streams. According to the Michigan Environmental Council, water flow in the Boardman and AuSable Rivers could drop by as much as 25 percent.

Water flow in the Betsie River, near Traverse City, could drop by as much as 42 percent - that would invite disaster, at least locally.

Senator Birkholz says that is wildly exaggerated nonsense. In the case of the Betsie, she says the maximum drop in the flow would be less than ten percent. She says her figures come from a new “state water withdrawal assessment tool.”

The senator seems to think the computer-based assessment tool is the greatest thing since the microchip.

But James Clift, policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, thinks that’s naïve.

He says the tool focuses only on how fish populations would be affected while ignoring other ecological conditions.

Meanwhile, a parallel package of bills are making their way through the Democratic-controlled state house. They would do more to limit water withdrawal than the Senate bills.

They would call for inspections and individual assessments whenever large water withdrawals are contemplated. How local people felt about any withdrawal would also be a factor.

Like most people, I don’t know who is right. I don’t have the technical knowledge to assess how reliable Patty Birkholz’s assessment tool might be. I am left uneasy by the fact that she would essentially not limit any water withdrawals of any size.

What would make more sense to me would be to create a panel of the top three experts on water in the state, chosen perhaps by the schools of natural resources at MSU and the University of Michigan.

Empower them to rule on the safety of water withdrawals, subject to court appeal. All I really know is that we have only so much fresh water and one set of Great Lakes.

And if we mess them up, we’re done for. So let’s err on the side of caution.

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Interview: Patricia Birkholz - 11/26/07

In recent months, there has been great concern that Michigan is not doing enough to protect its fresh water resources. State Senator Patricia Birkholz, a Republican from the Saugatuck area, has introduced a package of bills to protect them. But, her critics say her plan would, instead, allow farms, factories and other people to take so much water from rivers and streams that their flow rates would be greatly reduced. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with the senator regarding her bill.

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