Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Best We Could Do - 2.12.10

Governor Granholm delivered her final budget proposal for the next year. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry gives us his take on the Governor’s plan…

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Governor Jennifer Granholm’s final budget proposal is her best and most realistic ever.

The bottom line: The state is facing a deficit for the fiscal year ahead that is likely to be at least $2 billion. After years of deficits and cuts, there is simply no fat left to trim.

There are only two choices: Impose crippling cuts on education at all levels - elementary and secondary and higher ed.

After that, make more deep cuts to what remains of our budget to fix roads and bridges, things like that, and reduce or ruin what remains of the budget for human services, including Medicaid.

The other option is to do what politicians call “find new revenue,” which means, of course, raising taxes in some form.

Nobody ever wants to pay more taxes, especially now. The recession has thrown many of us out of work. Others who are still working have seen incomes decline, but not expenses.

The Michigan Chamber of Commerce would evidently prefer balancing the budget without new taxes, no matter what. Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, if I understand him correctly, also is insisting that he will oppose any new revenue.

But here’s the problem with that. Balancing the budget with cuts alone would ruin our state’s ability to compete, possibly for the rest of our lives. We have an undereducated workforce, thanks to the legacy of our old brawn-based automotive economy. For decades, we saw little need for higher education, as long as unskilled labor could make high wages working on the line in our auto factories.

Those days, and most of the factories, are gone. Our only hope is attracting new economy, high-tech jobs. In order to do that, we have to have an environment and a workforce worth coming for.

If we destroy higher education and allow our infrastructure to deteriorate further, we have no hope of getting those jobs.

Governor Jennifer Granholm is offering a sensible alternative. We’ve been becoming more of a service-based rather than a manufacturing-based economy. She wants to extend the sales tax to most services, and drop the tax rate by half a percent.

She would cleverly and responsibly require that the new revenue be used at first only to eliminate the deficit in the school aid fund. Within two years, when that is accomplished, the new money would be shifted to wipe out the stupid surcharge the lawmakers irresponsibly slapped on the Michigan Business Tax back in 2007.

You can argue that this isn’t the best way. Some liberals are complaining that sales taxes hurt the poor. But there is no alternative. The budget has to be balanced, this year.

Michigan’s constitution forbids a graduated income tax, and there is no way to change it in time. You can argue with portions of this budget. Granholm wants a new tax on physicians that could drive doctors out of state. Instead of restoring the Michigan Promise Grant as promised, she would bring it back as a tax credit after graduation.

That won’t make students happy. But the spotlight now turns to the Republicans. Are they really interested in saving our state?

Do they value getting Michigan through this crisis and giving our children a chance for a future more than ideological purity?

Whatever the answer, we’re about to find out.

Essay: Farewell to a Free Mind - 2.11.10

Congressman Vern Ehlers of Grand Rapids announced yesterday that he was retiring at the end of this term. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry looks back at his remarkable career.

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I have to tell you, that news left me a little depressed, all day. Not for the congressman himself. For him to step down now makes a lot of sense from a human perspective, as does just about everything Ehlers has done throughout his career.

While he is as mentally sharp as ever, the congressman turned 76 last week. He has a healthy, well-rounded attitude towards life, more so than most politicians I've known.

Serving in Congress is hard work if you do it right. His wife Johanna has had health issues, and he decided he wanted to enjoy some of the years they have left. He said something yesterday that was so sensible it's hard to believe a politician said it:

"Each of us should recognize that the world doesn't depend just on us. I've been there 16 years now. That's more than enough time for most people and I've accomplished a great deal."

So why am I sad? Because he was that rare thing in politics, a work horse, not a show horse; a man who had a mind open to compromise and who actually got more done than he got or took credit for. He was a man of both science and faith.

His background was unique. He is a conservative Republican and a deeply committed Christian who was also a scientist; a kid from small-town Minnesota who earned a PhD in physics at UCLA.

He became a physics professor in Grand Rapids and got into local politics because he cared about waste management issues. Before he knew it, he found himself in the state legislature. Then it was on to Congress, after Paul Henry died tragically of a brain tumor. There, the professor became a master of getting things done behind the scenes. You've heard a lot about Asian carp lately? Few did more to fight them then Vern Ehlers.

In fact, he was the man responsible for the electric barrier designed to keep them out of the lakes -- something that might have worked if the authorities had turned it on and kept it on.

Nobody has done more, in fact, to get funds to clean up our lakes and fight invasive species. But you haven't heard him grandstanding about that. Nor do most of us didn't know that Vern Ehlers was the man responsible for moving the House's computer, vote-tallying and e-mail systems out of the stone age.

He liked to tell high school kids that he had been a nerd, and telling them not to look down on the nerds of their generation, because the cool kids would all end up working for one.

Ehlers wasn't comfortable criticizing his colleagues. He did, however, once tell me this: "Conservatives ought to remember their legacy of conservation, and that to be conservative means to conserve what is good. Unfortunately, some vocal members of our party tend to forget that." That philosophy led him to oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic, and to oppose parts of the Patriot Act.

There are many issues on which I disagreed with the congressman. But if I lived in Grand Rapids, I think I would have voted for him, every time.

Essay: Time for Grownups - 2.10.10

Governor Granholm unveils her new budget tomorrow and another battle with the Republicans is likely to begin. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks both parties can learn from the example set by a former president of MSU.

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Back in 1993, Michigan State University trustees startled everyone with their choice of a new president. He was Peter McPherson, a banker and lawyer who had held top posts in the Reagan Administration, most of that time as director of AID - the U.S. Agency for International Development.

That appointment was highly controversial on campus because McPherson had never been an academic, and didn’t have a Ph.D, which meant he probably couldn’t have gotten tenure at the school he was suddenly running. But to many people’s surprise, he was highly successful and lasted more than a decade in the job.

His political talents enabled him to do better than our state’s other schools at getting money from Lansing. His financial skills enabled the school to hold the line on tuition, and to successfully run MSU’s first-ever billion-dollar capital campaign.

Meanwhile, he built what was then the largest undergraduate study abroad program, and managed to get the Detroit College of Law to become part of MSU.

When it was clear that he was going to be an action-oriented, can-do kind of leader, I went to interview him, to ask what was the secret to his success. I thought he’d talk about his background.

But he didn’t. The key, he said, “was deciding who you are, who you are supposed to be serving, and what you want to be.” Once you have that firmly in mind, your course should be clear.

MSU, he told me, had spent too much time trying to be the University of Michigan. What it had to do was be itself.

Peter McPherson left the state five years ago, and later went on to become the last chairman of Dow-Jones. But he left an example that both Governor Jennifer Granholm and the Republicans in the legislature ought to think about, and try to follow.

Once again, they are confronting an enormous budget deficit, the worst in many ways in state history. The stimulus money is gone; all the easy cuts have been made, and they have to find a way of closing a gap of at least $1.6 billion dollars by this fall.

The governor has vowed not to cut education further, and promised that she would find a way to restore the Michigan Promise Scholarship this year. Republicans, who control the state senate, are vowing no tax increases, no matter what.

But those two vows are mutually irreconcilable. There is no way to balance this budget without making severe cuts to both higher and lower education, and slashing further what remains of state services.

No way, that is, without raising taxes in some form. There is also no way we can refuse to raise revenue this year and avoid seriously damaging the things Michigan needs to be competitive. For if we don’t build a landing strip for the future, prosperity won’t come.

What we really need is for the leaders of our state to sit down and ask themselves the questions Peter McPherson asked:

What kind of state do we want to be? How do we get there? Who do we serve and as leaders, what should our priorities be?

If they do that, Michigan might have a chance. If they go back to ideology and political posturing, we’re sunk.

It’s as simple as that.

Essay: The Politics of Carp - 2.9.10

Yesterday's so-called Asian carp summit in Washington produced no dramatic solutions. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about politics, and fish.

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Governor Jennifer Granholm and Attorney General Mike Cox don't like each other much, but they have a few things in common. Both came out of nowhere to be elected Michigan attorney general, and soon started thinking about running for governor.

And both think the federal government isn't doing nearly enough to stop Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.

Yesterday, the White House held what was billed as an Asian carp summit, to figure out how to deal with these fish, they've been migrating north ever since they accidentally got into the Mississippi River in Arkansas, about twenty years ago.

It would be hard to exaggerate their potential threat to the Great Lakes. There are two varieties. The bighead carp is an ugly fish that can get up to four feet long and weigh a hundred pounds. The silver carp are slightly smaller, but have a distressing habit of jumping. They have knocked boaters unconscious and broken bones. Worse, these fish multiply rapidly, and suck up most of the plankton other fish need to survive.

Experts differ on how quickly they could establish themselves in the Great Lakes. But it is clear that if they do, it could wipe out the fishing industry, which is worth something like $7 billion a year.

We can't take chances, in other words. Now, we should have seen this coming. For years, Asian carp have been working their way north. But now, silver carp DNA has been found in Lake Michigan near Chicago, though no fish themselves have been found yet.

Michigan officials wanted a series of artificial locks connecting the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to Lake Michigan closed, permanently. Illinois and Chicago officials oppose this, saying that would hurt their economy. President Obama is from Illinois, and he sided with them. Ever since, Attorney General Cox, a Republican, has been bashing the President. Governor Granholm has to be far more circumspect about this, but it is plain she disagrees too. However, it is worth noting that the U.S. Supreme Court, which can hardly be accused of doing Obama's bidding, also refused to close the locks.

Yesterday, the federal government did propose a $78 million plan to try and keep the carp out. This would not in fact be new money, but money intended to improve the lakes in other ways. The government intends to build new barriers to try and stop the fish.

They also intend to improve efforts to search for the carp. While it seems likely that some fish have strayed into Lake Michigan, experts say it would take several hundred to establish a permanent breeding population. So it may still be possible to stop them.

I am by no means an expert in aquatic biology, but I do know something about politics and people, and here's what I think.

Our only hope to save the lakes ecology from being destroyed by these creatures is eternal vigilance; we need to forget political grandstanding and stop looking for one-step solutions.

We need to fund and put in place a host of federal, state and regional measures designed to keep out the carp. That is, unless you would rather explain to your grandchildren over one more carp dinner that there were once perch and walleye in the Great Lakes too.

Essay: Spending Money - 2.8.10

Last night, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rick Snyder spent more than a million dollars to run a commercial during the Super Bowl. Senior Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has always been fascinated by how people spend money.

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Sometimes my students at Wayne State University ask me questions that aren't related to journalism, but have to do with the real world. They figure that since I am in my fifties and not yet homeless, that I must know something about this thing called life.

Well, often I don't, but sometimes I can be minimally helpful.

Occasionally I even give fashion advice, even though my own wardrobe consists largely of baggy gray suits.

I did once tell one young woman who had a giant tattoo of a dragon across her neck that wearing a ruffled collar to her job interview in Holland might be a good idea.

Sometimes, students ask me about money. Last term, I cautioned them that it is pretty hard to make a living at journalism these days. This was greeted with disdain by one woman. I really don't think I need all that much money to live, she said. I asked if she planned on eventually breeding, as I put it.

Well, yes, she wanted two children. You can forget everything I taught you about David Sarnoff, but remember this, I said. Children cost money. Astronomical sums.

Fortunately, Wayne State students are highly diverse, and I frequently have older adults in my classes who are already breeders. They agreed that for once I was right.

Personally, I am always fascinated by how people spend money, especially those lucky few who have lots of it. Yesterday, for example, Rick Snyder, a venture capitalist from Ann Arbor, spent more than a million to run a campaign commercial during the Super Bowl. Snyder wants to be the Republican nominee for governor.

Now, the election is still so far away that if my potentially breeding student became pregnant today, she would probably have her baby before the voting. But campaigns start early.

The polls now show few know who Mr. Snyder is, and that only three percent of likely voters in the GOP primary favor him. He's running way behind Mike Cox, Pete Hoekstra and Mike Bouchard. But Snyder is far richer than they are, and he's apparently betting that enough green stuff can close the gap. I can't imagine spending that kind of money running for anything, but some people might think my own spending is bizarre.

Last month, my dog was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was like a child to me, and I went to the state's best critical care veterinary hospital in an effort to save him. This didn't work, sadly, though the cost was around eight hundred dollars a day.

We're in a virtual depression in Michigan, and yet the waiting room of that hospital's cancer ward was packed with people. I talked to one woman who had spent thousands on her cat. She wasn't rich, but it was worth it to her. But she was very bitter about President Obama's stimulus programs, which she saw as wasting money. I wonder how she feels about Justin Verlander getting $80 million to throw a baseball.

Finally, one of my students asked me the one economic question I had been waiting for. How much money do you need to live? For once, I knew the answer. Five thousand more than you've got, I said. And that figure will stay constant your entire life.

I wonder if Rick Snyder feels the same way.

Essay: Lawmakers Lifetime Health Care Benefits - 2.5.10

The Michigan House voted to end lifetime benefits for legislators this week, but Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says the reality isn’t at all what it seems.

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Here's something you may believe, but which just isn't so. A lot of people have the idea that anyone who serves in the Michigan Legislature gets free, top-notch health care for life. Many of the people who think that's true are now happy because they are also under the impression that this is now over. Aren't you glad that they at least voted to end their lifetime health care benefits? I was asked this week. Even the governor contributed to the confusion the other night, praising the Michigan House for passing a bill that eliminates lifetime health care benefits for lawmakers who serve a mere six years.

Now here's the reality. First of all, the legislature hasn't finally passed anything yet. True, the House Monday did pass a bill ending healthcare benefits by a near-unanimous, 103-to-1 vote. But before they did, the Democratic leadership went back on their word and made it so it only applies to members elected in the future. Anybody serving now keeps what they have.

And the state senate hasn't even taken up the bill. We don't even know if they will. It might just die, and nothing would change. There's another flawed assumption, too. The notion that all lawmakers get free health care for life. That isn't true either. The other day I heard from a lawmaker who is in her last term and had the guts to say the truth, on the record.

State Rep. Marie Donigan of Royal Oak is completing her third and final term. Before getting elected to the legislature, she was a landscape architect for the city of Farmington Hills. I know there's a widespread belief that legislators get free lifetime health care. Even we legislators repeat it, even though we know it is not true, she said. What they are eligible for is coverage once they are 55, which is exactly what Donigan is now. The way it works is that most of the costs are borne by the Legislative Retirement System, the state, in other words. The retiree pays 10 percent, plus prescription co-pays.

That's a pretty sweet deal, she admits, and thinks it ought to be modified. I think addressing the premiums makes sense. Is 90 percent too much for the state? Should the co-pays be higher. She thinks so. But losing those benefits at her age would be a real handicap for Donigan, who is not rich. I chose to give up my retiree healthcare from Farmington Hills to work for the state. She said, if my state healthcare is repealed, I will have to start over again. However, she is aware of political realities, and her husband is running for her term-limited seat. So, she said, "I'll just vote for whatever gets put on the voting board. I just know that when it comes down to it, repealing free lifetime healthcare will be easy. Because that's not what we have now."

It doesn't now appear that she will lose any benefits, and I'm fine with that. Donigan never became a legislative star or even a committee chair, but has been a hard-working lawmaker. And she told me, "I believe that all people should have access to good healthcare and that no one should lose their benefits." What always surprises me is that everybody else doesn't think so too.

Essay: Post State of the State - 2.4.10

Governor Granholm delivered her final State of the State address last night. Her speech focused on education, job-creation and the economy. However, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks we should pay attention more to what the Governor didn’t say in the address...

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Here’s something nobody will tell you about Governor Jennifer Granholm’s speech last night, but which everyone who saw it knows is true. Too much of it was terribly, mind-numbingly boring.

For nearly an hour, in an effort to show the good things she had done during her seven years in office, she told us about some company in Eaton Rapids that was able to stay in business making wind turbine parts and how a man who lost his job in St. John’s went back to school and now works in alternative energy, etc.

Those are worthy and true stories and deserve to be part of the record, but the reality is this. The governor’s final state of the state speech came at the end of what was a long and busy day, and I suspect few normal people had the energy to listen to an hour’s worth of this on a work night. To be fair, the governor did acknowledge how bad things are. Right at the start, after the obligatory nod to our men and women in uniform, she told us what most of us already knew.

“The old Michigan economy is gone.” We‘ve lost a million jobs that aren‘t coming back. Everyone knows that the economy needs to diversify, and she proceeded to spend most of her final state of the state speech explaining and justifying the steps she and her administration have taken to get the job done.

Did she do the right things? We certainly need to hope so, and that her policies did set us on the path to a economically revitalized Michigan. But we won’t really know for years.

What we do know, however, is this: We have to get through this year first. “The budget process is broken - it’s a last-minute, crisis-driven disaster,” she said. Truer words were never spoken.

Governor Granholm wisely said that things couldn’t go on like this, and that the lawmakers needed to get their stuff together and balance the budget as soon as possible.

Nobody would argue with that, in theory. She also said she would “draw the line” against more education cuts, and vowed to restore the Michigan Promise Scholarship.

Now here’s the problem. What she did not tell Michigan last night was that what she wants to do will take new taxes of some size, shape or form. The lawmakers all know that.

And the Republicans have vowed to prevent any kind of tax increases. They will argue that any new taxes are always bad.

This was the governor’s one chance to convince all of us otherwise. To persuade us we need to spend a little more now to give our children and ourselves a future.

But she was unwilling to do try to that. Instead, she told us she would let us know later, when the cameras are off.

I don’t know how she expects to succeed then. Seventy years ago, in a far worse crisis, Winston Churchill told his people, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,“ and inspired them to save western civilization.

Today, our task is to somehow rebuild Michigan’s shattered economy. Last night, it seemed to me that a little dose of Sir Winston‘s grim eloquence might have been exactly what we needed.

Essay: State of the State - 2.3.10

Governor Granholm delivers her final State of the State address tonight. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry knows what he’d like to hear.

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Governor Jennifer Granholm’s final state of the state speech is tonight, and the state’s political commentators have been acting as if this will be the most-watched event since the first time Gone With the Wind was shown on TV.

Guess what. It won’t be, of course. My guess is that the number of people who actually watch the speech will compare unfavorably with those who watch old episodes of Law and Order recorded inside their T Vs, thanks to the magic of DVR.

People like me will hear the speech of course, but the odds are that even we won’t remember a word of it a year from now. Over the last thirty-some years, I have listened to dozens of state of the state and state of the union speeches. The only line that I can easily remember from any is honest old President Gerald Ford telling us, after the nightmare of Watergate, that “the state of the union is not good.”

More recently, many of us recall the moment that has come back to haunt our present governor, when she told us that we’d be so prosperous that we would be “blown away.”

Now, thanks to term limits, we know this state of the state will be her last. Most of the experts expect her to use this speech to sum up her record - in a favorable way, of course - and “define her legacy,” whatever that means.

Well, if she does try to do that, she will be making a mistake. We won’t really know her true legacy for some years, and in the final analysis, she won‘t be the one who defines it. Historians, political scientists and the court of public opinion will.

Not the governor herself. Bill Milliken was governor for fourteen years and John Engler for twelve. They may have tried to sum up their records in their last state of the states.

But if so, nobody remembers what they said.

What we do remember is what they did. Yesterday, Liz Boyd, Jennifer Granholm’s long-serving press secretary, said the governor would, “focus tonight on her priorities, job creation and economic diversity, educating citizens and protecting them.”

Well, that’s justifiable, except that if she does, nobody, including the people in the chamber, will remember anything she said three days from now. What she needs to do is shock us.

Our present system of government is failing. You can see proof in the legislature‘s repeated failure to balance the budget, adequately fund education, and fix the Michigan Business Tax.

Governor Granholm has a year left to try to fix things. What she needs to do is tell us, frankly and candidly, that the state of the state is not good. She needs to lay out how bad things are and shoulder her share of blame. Then, she should announce a plan to fix it.

She can’t fix the economy by herself. What she and the legislature can do, however, is leave our state in a better position to cope with whatever the world throws at us.

Last week, the governor looked more like a leader than at any time in the previous seven years, laying out a bold new plan to restructure state government and embracing a constitutional convention. Let’s hope the leadership continues tonight.

Essay: Raiding the Kitty - 2.2.10

This year, a number of gubernatorial candidates are expected to seek state campaign finance funds for the primary election. But, as Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains, the money might not be there…

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Once upon a time, way back in the long-ago 1970s, we thought we could do something about the corrupting influence of special interest money in our gubernatorial elections.

So here’s what happened. The Michigan Legislature passed a bill that established public financing of races for governor. Here’s how it was supposed to work: Taxpayers have the option of checking a little box on their Michigan Income Tax returns.

If they do, three dollars of what they owe go into the state campaign fund. Candidates running for governor can then get matching funds of up to a million dollars in the primary and a little more than a million dollars in the general election, under one condition: They have to promise to spend less than two million in the primary and no more than two million in the general election.

That was, in fact, a reasonable sum for a statewide campaign for governor back in 1975, when I was still wearing earth shoes and computers were something that filled buildings and spat out punch cards. Politics has long since become more expensive.

For years, candidates for governor have turned down the state campaign money for the general election, to give them the freedom to raise and spend much more. Four years ago, for example, Jennifer Granholm’s campaign spent nearly $16 million dollars.

Dick DeVos spent more than $42 million, just to lose. Neither party had a contested primary that year.

This year, the governorship is completely open. The candidates who win their party’s nominations are expected to again turn down general election funding, but many of the lesser-known or less rich candidates are expected to seek it for the primary campaign.

But a potential scandal is brewing. There may not be enough money in the kitty, because the legislature stole it. Well, stealing may be too harsh, but they took it. Raided the fund.

This happened during the 2007 fiscal crisis. The lawmakers needed to balance the budget, and didn’t have the guts to raise revenue, so they quietly plundered a number of funds that were supposed to be restricted.

These included money that was supposed to be for the Soo Locks, for helping create jobs and yes, from the state campaign fund. The lawmakers took most of what was there and threw it in the state budget deficit hole. Good government types complained at the time, and talked about a possible class action suit, but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, fewer and fewer citizens are choosing to designate the three dollars from their tax returns, presumably because they are turned off by politics. Less then ten percent do nowadays.

Consequently, there is a real threat that the fund will run dry this year. A highly placed source told me yesterday that as many as seven candidates may seek matching funds for the August primary. But there may be no more than a total of two million available.

This is sort of shameful. The legislature could easily fix this, but nobody is pushing them to do so. Instead, we are essentially once again limiting campaigns to the very rich and those controlled by special interests. So if we are all comfortable with that, we should just stop pretending and say so.

Otherwise, we ought to fix things, fast.

Essay: Praise for the Governor - 2.1.10

Governor Granholm startled many on Friday when she unveiled a tough government reform plan that calls for considerable sacrifice. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a closer look…

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We’ve all seen those situation comedies where a man decides to change his behavior. His wife comes home to find the dishes done and put away and the whole house clean. She stares, turns to the man and screams… “What have you done with my husband!”

Frankly, I have to confess I felt a little like that last week. First, Governor Jennifer Granholm startled me by embracing the idea of a constitutional convention, something that I have long felt was our last best hope of fixing our largely dysfunctional state government.

Then, however, she really did blow me away at the end of the week by unveiling a tough, gutsy, and sensible plan for government reform which could be a significant first step in coping with the mess we are in. To bring you up to date:

Thanks to the economy and a flawed budgeting process, Michigan is once again facing what could be almost a three billion dollar federal deficit for the fiscal year beginning this fall.

President Obama’s stimulus money is nearly gone. There is no more easy fat to cut from state government. Unless a combination of intelligent sacrifices are made and lawmakers agree to some new revenue, higher education could be permanently crippled.

The state, unlike the federal government, has to balance its books somehow. Having strong research and teaching universities that Michigan residents can afford to attend is our best hope.

Hope for a prosperous future.

For years, I have been sharply critical of the governor for her failure to make hard decisions. But she is now doing just that.

She is proposing legislation that would all but force state workers and teachers to retire after thirty years on the job. That would save the state more than a billion dollars over the next decade.

They would also pay more towards their retirement funds. New school employees would have pensions based partly on contributions. Former legislators would lose lifetime retirement benefits, something long overdue in this age of term limits.

This plan immediately drew howls of protest from her union allies, many of whom seem to think this is 1965. Guess what. It’s not. Ninety-one percent of the General Motors jobs that were here thirty years ago are gone, and they are never coming back.

The governor’s plan is far superior to the one being promoted by Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop. Here’s one example. The governor would require state employees to pay 20 percent of their health care costs. The senator would extend that to every public employee, and also cut their salaries by five percent.

That would be an open invitation to every academic superstar at our major universities to move elsewhere. We could say goodbye to giants like Sean Morrison and Juan Cole.

Interestingly, while Senator Bishop’s plan would hurt school janitors more, he is unwilling to give up the lifetime pension he is due to receive after he leaves Lansing at the ripe old age of forty-three.

We are in for some difficult times. The key question is whether we will make sacrifices that will allow us to build a better future, or whether we will do what no farmer would, and eat our seed corn.

The governor has offered an intelligent plan that is at least a reasonable start.