Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Immigration - 6.15.10

It’s no secret that Michigan’s population has been declining as job-seekers leave the state. But, the state’s birthrate is also in a steep decline. Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry has a solution…

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Over the last few years, we’ve had to cope with a lot of bad news. Well, here’s something else to consider. In addition to not having enough jobs, we Michiganders seem to be dying out.

At least in our native Michigan, that is.

We won’t have official census figures until December, but the experts think we are now actually losing population.

Since the 1970s, Michigan has grown less fast than the national average, which is why we've lost four seats in Congress in the last thirty years. But we continued to add people every decade.

Now, that may no longer be the case. We think Michigan’s population touched ten million a few years ago, and then fell back. Everybody knows that thousands who couldn’t find jobs have left Michigan. We know that newly graduated college students are leaving in droves, going to Chicago and Seattle and Atlanta to start their careers. But what you may not know is that those of us who are still here aren’t having as many babies, either. This was pointed out by the man I call the Great Demographer - Kurt Metzger, a former U.S. Census Bureau official who now directs Data Driven Detroit.

According to new state figures, there were 121,231 babies born in Michigan in 2008.

That is thirty-two thousand fewer babies than were arriving in our state only eight years earlier.

Early indications are that even fewer are being born now. By the way, even the figure from a decade ago is far less than the number of Michigan babies born every year during the 1950s, the decade in which most of us baby boomers were hatched.

More than two hundred thousand were born in 1957, for example, back when Michigan had only about seven and a half million people. Now, the dropping birthrate may sound very fine if you are a member of Zero Population Growth.

But it means potential disaster for the schools, and possibly our future as well.

Luring new jobs to Michigan may be that much harder if there isn’t an adequate supply of workers to fill them.

Well, there’s an answer, and a way to rebuild our state’s population and economy: Immigration.

We desperately need more immigrants. One of the silliest things going on right now is that there are politicians running for office in this state bashing illegal immigrants.

That’s ethically ridiculous, when you consider that we’re all descendants of people who were viewed as illegal immigrants by the Ottawa and Huron tribes who occupied Michigan before the white eyes got here.

But forget about ethics: Immigrants are excellent for the economy. They tend to have high birth rates and be well educated, entrepreneurial, and highly patriotic wannabe Americans.

Yes, they don’t tend to come from the same English and German ethnic stock as the founding fathers, but so what?

We’ve hopefully gotten past all that. Louisiana has a governor whose parents came from India. South Carolina seems likely to elect another one, and you just might have noticed the ethnic background of the man in the White House.

Kurt Metzger thinks Michigan ought to be trying to aggressively recruit immigrants, and I couldn’t agree more.

Actually, it’s sort of like the reverse of that movie, Field of Dreams. They will build and rebuild it, if only we let them come.

Essay: Money Talks - 6.14.10

This week, the Michigan Senate will be debating whether to approve a new bridge over the Detroit River. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks that campaign cash may be playing a role.

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An epic battle is shaping up in the Michigan Senate this week over whether or not to build a new bridge across the Detroit River.

Most statewide leaders, from Brooks Patterson to Jennifer Granholm, think that makes common, practical and financial sense. There is now no backup for the privately owned, 81-year-old Ambassador Bridge, which carries billions in trade every year. Planners have settled on a jointly owned, internationally run bridge called the Detroit River International Crossing, or DRIC for short.

The Canadian government wants another bridge. So much so they are willing to advance cash-strapped Michigan the money needed to start the project. Canada has also told the owner of the Ambassador Bridge, Manuel Moroun, that it won’t allow him to build a second bridge next to the Ambassdor.

Ohio’s economy is also tied to trade with Ontario, and last month the Ohio senate voted unanimously to support the new bridge, which would be two miles south of the old.

But there is plenty of opposition in the Michigan legislature, especially among Republicans. The House only narrowly passed the bridge bill last month, with no GOP support.

As of today, there seem to be more state senators against the bridge than for it. If everyone else thinks a new bridge is a good idea, what’s going on under the Capitol dome?

The answer would seem to be partly money. Moroun wants to stop a new bridge from being built, by any means necessary. It has long been known that the 83-year-old billionaire hasn’t been shy about spreading campaign donations around.

But nobody knew exactly how much he gave Michigan politicians, until the Detroit Free Press published the figures yesterday. The total: $1.8 million dollars.

That includes more than $85,000 to the Michigan Senate Republican Campaign Committee. Virtually every candidate for governor has gotten campaign cash from Moroun.

Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, one of the few members of congress not to support the new bridge, has gotten more than a hundred thousand dollars in direct and indirect money.

Now, it is still illegal to give any officeholder money as a direct quid pro quo for a vote. It is also true that some opponents of the new bridge don’t seem to have received any money from the Moroun family. Likewise, some who have gotten Moroun money are now supporting the DRIC bridge, including Jennifer Granholm.

Dan Stamper, the president of Moroun’s International Bridge Company, denied that the Morouns’ giving was meant to influence votes, though he did acknowledge they made, quote, “political contributions to federal and state officeholders that have influence on the business and employment climate that affects us.“

There are a lot of complex factors involved in the bridge decision, but under our current system, politicians need to raise vast sums of cash to be elected. Those who are capable of giving them that kind of money expect to be listened to. Human nature being what it is, it is reasonable to think that big donors are going to have more influence than someone who doesn’t have a dime.

The US Supreme Court says corporate giving to politicians is freedom of speech. Others call it an invitation to corruption. It will be interesting to see how the bridge wars finally turn out.

Essay: Budget Solution - 6.11.10

Far fewer teachers seem to be retiring than the legislature expected, which is bad news for the bottom line. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the solution is beer.

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Here’s something that evidently is a big surprise to the legislature, but will be no surprise at all to anyone who knows anything about teachers. Far fewer of them are applying for the retirement package than the state’s accountants had expected.

Less than a month ago, the legislature finally squeezed through a teacher retirement incentive package designed to help both school districts and the state get their costs under control.

Eligible teachers who applied to retire by this week’s deadline would get a slightly sweetened pension. Those who elected to stay would get less when they did retire, and to add injury to insult, teachers who don’t retire will lose three percent of their pay next year.

State bean counters had predicted about half of Michigan’s eligible teachers would accept the deal, which would mean about twenty-eight thousand would retire at the end of this month.

But guess what. It looks like the number choosing to retire is barely half what they expected. As of yesterday, the state had only received some fourteen thousand applications.

Today’s the deadline for those to be put in the mail. The final total may be a thousand or two higher, but won’t come close to what was predicted. This may have shocked the legislature.

But it comes as no shock to anyone who knows anything about teachers. They tend to be dedicated professionals who care very much about their careers, which they see as far more than just a job.

They feel that what they do -- educating the next generation -- is important in itself, not just a stepping stone. Plus -- many of the teachers eligible to retire under this package are in their early or mid-50s. That is when most professionals are at their best.

Many still have children at home or in college, don’t need a loss of income, and just aren’t ready to retire. So they aren’t leaving.

This will actually be good for our kids, since an experienced teacher is frequently better than a brand new one, but means less savings for school districts. According to the House Fiscal Agency, fewer retirements mean about $110 million dollars less in savings than they thought they’d have next year.

Well, I have a solution. Raise the tax on beer, and give the money to the schools. That’s right, raise the tax on beer.

They haven’t touched the beer tax since they lowered it in 1966 -- to less than two cents a bottle -- and it has stayed there ever since, Actually, when you consider inflation, it is far less than it was.

No other product in Michigan has maintained the same tax rate for forty-four years. Had the beer tax been indexed to inflation, a bottle of beer would now cost a dime more, and the state would have an additional $275 million dollars a year.

Beer is not a necessity, by the way.

Nobody is forced to consume beer. Those who do probably would barely notice an extra dime per bottle. Research from other states shows no sign that raising the beer tax hurts jobs or consumption. Except perhaps among illegal underage drinkers. The Michigan Legislature could make a historic decision and declare that our children’s future is more important than really cheap beer.

If you agree, you just might want to let your leaders know.

Essay: Endorsements - 6.10.10

The candidates running for governor are competing for endorsements from their peers and newspapers. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what endorsements really mean…

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Dick and Betsy DeVos, who live on the west side of the state, recommend you vote for Attorney General Mike Cox, who lives on the east, for governor in the Aug. 3 Republican primary.

But Congresswoman Candice Miller of Macomb County thinks you should vote for Pete Hoekstra, who is from Holland.

Gilda Jacobs, a state senator from Huntington Woods, thinks they’re all wrong and you should vote in the Democratic primary instead, for Andy Dillon, now the Speaker of the House.

And Dan Kildee of Flint, who himself ran for governor for about five minutes last winter, thinks you should vote for Lansing mayor Virg Bernero instead. His uncle Dale, who has represented Flint in Congress since about 1845, agrees.

Matter of fact, they showed up yesterday with about a dozen other Flint-area officials to urge a vote for Bernero.

Politicians used to do this sort of thing at the entrance to a factory, so that they could shake hands with workers. In this case, the Flint officials showed up to endorse Bernero at the abandoned Buick City plant, which provided stark symbolism, if not voters.

Meanwhile, Rick Snyder, whose net worth may be greater than all the other candidates combined, didn’t have any new endorsements, but put out a letter saying he was “strongly committed to the rights of the unborn.” A spokesman said it was pure coincidence that he was doing this the same week Right to Life of Michigan is making its endorsements.

By the way, Snyder isn’t going to get that endorsement, because he also favors embryonic stem cell research. He seems to be trying to get the anti-abortion lobbyists to at least not denounce him, and hopefully not endorse anyone at all.

But just what do these endorsements mean, anyway? I have never met anyone who said, “The Daily Gazette just endorsed Herkimer for governor, and that means I’m for him too!” Years ago, I asked an old editorial writer in Memphis, Tennessee about endorsements.

“Well,” he said, “It’s like wetting your pants while wearing a dark blue suit. It gives you a nice warm feeling, and nobody notices.”

However, he allowed that sometimes it didn’t feel so good later on. He’d endorsed one candidate who ended up in the penitentiary. Frankly, I’ve never met anyone who said their vote for governor was swayed by a newspaper editorial or a politician’s endorsement.

Where these endorsements really count are in so-called lesser races. Some years ago, I knew a very qualified lawyer who was running for judge in a large county where the voters tended to pick judges who had Irish names. She wasn’t Irish.

What was worse, her opponent, who didn’t have her qualifications, did have an Irish name. “I’m doomed,” she told me.

Maybe not, I said, I encouraged her to visit every newspaper in the county and win their editorial endorsements.

Most people don’t know anything about candidates for judicial positions, and often rely on newspaper recommendations.

My friend won all the endorsements, and ended up winning by less than one percent of the vote. This may not be a perfect system.

However, there are worse ways to pick candidates. For example: The legislature just repealed the statute outlawing dueling. They said that’s something we no longer need to worry about.

Given our politics today, I’m not so sure.

Essay: School Aid Crisis - 6.9.10

There is a deficit in the current year’s state budget… and, now, Republican leaders in the state senate are talking about using money from the school aid fund to fill it. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares his thoughts.

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There are a number of reasons that Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the nation - and wide disagreement on the reasons why. Republicans tend to say our taxes are too high.

Democrats tend to blame NAFTA, and unfair trade policies on behalf of the nations we do business with, principally Mexico and Japan.

Everybody agrees that the vast decline in auto jobs are a big reason many of us are out of work. But many of these jobs vanished years ago. Why aren’t there other jobs to take their place?

Why is unemployment expected to linger in Michigan, long after people go back to work in other states?

One big reason is education. We are an undereducated state. The percentage of adults with college degrees is lower than average. Our children have lower test scores, especially in big cities.

In the old days we never worried much about education, because we didn’t have to. For most of the twentieth century, Michigan had a thriving, muscle-based economy.

The auto industry generated so much money that the state was able to build a system of fine universities to turn out engineering and managerial talent, and the odd doctor and lawyer here and there. But you didn’t have to go to college to make a living.

If you got through high school and could endure the boredom of the assembly line, you could live quite well in Michigan. We saw education as a luxury. And then the bottom dropped out.

Now, the world is different. Our young people are going to have to be more highly educated, technologically savvy, flexible, and entrepreneurial. It’s that, or live in Grandma’s basement and ask people whether they want fries with their fast food.

We’ve been shortchanging education for a long time. Most Michigan adults lack higher education, so they tend to regard it as a frill. They’ve also been convinced that we can make deep cuts in elementary and secondary education without damaging schools’ ability to turn out students who will be competitive.

That makes about as much sense as the domestic auto industry’s belief in the 1970s that they could produce cars of inferior quality and compete effectively against imports.

The state school aid fund, the principal source of revenue for the public schools, has almost a billion dollars less than it did two years ago. Last year, every school district in the state was shortchanged by the state, thanks to the budget crisis.

Then last month, the schools got a little good news.

Thanks to a boost in sales tax collections, the school aid fund now has almost $300 million more dollars than expected. But the overall state budget has a deficit of almost as much.

Now, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop is talking about snatching that money away from the schools to plug the budget hole.

“We’ve got an obligation to balance the budget,” he told Michigan Radio.” That’s true. But he’s dead wrong to think it makes more sense to go after the schools, rather than, say, raise the tax on a bottle of beer.

Our children’s lives should be seen as more important than our own. Our future is more important than our past.

That’s something earlier generations of Americans knew. What’s baffling is why so many of us seem to have forgotten it.

Essay: Bare Cupboard Crisis – 6.8.10

Though few candidates have used it lately, Michigan has a law providing for public funding of gubernatorial campaigns. This year, however, some candidates got a nasty shock. The money wasn’t there anymore. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry explains.

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Here’s something baffling about the current campaign for governor of Michigan: Few people seem to care very much who wins, and fewer seem excited about any of the candidates.

And that, coupled with the fact that we’re in a deep recession, means campaign donations aren’t rolling in like they used to.

Some of this is surprising, given that the stakes are high, and the governor’s race is more wide open than it has ever been at any time in modern history. Less than two months before the primary, nobody has any idea who either party will nominate.

Both parties have hotly contested primary contests. Now, you might think that would mean the candidates would be staking out well-defined positions. You might think that campaign dollars would be pouring in. The only problem is that you would be wrong. Nobody seems to care very much.

Not enough, anyway, to open their wallets. Most of the candidates seem to be having a hard time raising money.

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox has compiled a campaign war chest of modest size, and Rick Snyder, the venture capitalist from Ann Arbor, may be personally wealthy enough to self-fund a campaign. But the rest are scratching for dough.

And in a blast back to the past, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, the man most polls show leading the Republican field, planned on financing his campaign with state matching funds.

What, you may wonder, are state matching funds? Way back in 1976, idealistic lawmakers made an effort to level the playing field. They didn’t want ONLY rich people to be able to run for office. .

They also didn‘t want wealthy contributors to have too much sway. So they set up a system where eligible candidates could qualify for state funding in primary contests.

For every dollar you raise from private donations, the state would give you two dollars. Up, that is, to a maximum of a little less than a million. The catch is if you took the money, you had to agree to spend no more than three million total on the primary campaign.

The money for the fund comes from a voluntary check off on your state income tax return. This system worked pretty well back in the 1970s. But campaigns have gotten more and more expensive, and the legislature has never increased the amount.

So in recent years, most candidates haven’t even tried to qualify for the state money, because they felt they both needed to spend much more, and were able to raise it.

But this year, Pete Hoekstra decided to try to qualify, and then got a nasty shock. The money was largely gone. The legislature, in an effort to balance the budget without making hard choices, quietly transferred millions out of the campaign fund three years ago.

Hoekstra, and anyone else who tries for state matching funds, will get far less than the money he legally has coming.

What the lawmakers did was technically not illegal, even if it seems unethical. And it highlights a dilemma.

Do we want campaign finance reform that means anything, or not? When Hoekstra found out the cupboard was bare, his spokesman said this “was a symptom of what‘s wrong in Lansing.”

Some of the other candidates agreed.

What none of them have told us, however, is how -- and whether -- they would fix it.

Essay: Helen Thomas' Gaffe - 6.7.10

Native Detroiter Helen Thomas has covered the White House for half a century, but now after controversial remarks, she has announced her retirement. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talks about Thomas' career.

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Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent, has been smashing through glass ceilings since she was a young woman in wartime Detroit. She had graduated from Wayne and wanted to be a journalist, so she told her mother she was going to visit a friend in Washington, D.C. She got a job working for United Press International, which had been her secret plan all along.

Young women from proper immigrant Lebanese families weren’t supposed to go off and have careers then, but Helen did. When John F. Kennedy was elected President, UPI assigned her to cover him in the White House. She never left. She covered Presidents Johnson and Nixon; Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton. When UPI was sold to the Unification Church ten years ago, she decided she couldn’t work for the Moonies. She thought her career was over. But Hearst newspapers hired her as a columnist, and she stayed on at the White House, where she is now covering her tenth president. By the way, an interesting thing happened early in Thomas’s White House career, though nobody knew about it for a long time. She was covering President Kennedy on Aug. 4, 1961, her 41st birthday. That day a baby named Barack Obama was born.

But Helen Thomas is now in the worst trouble of her career. On May 27, a rabbi put a video camera in front of her on Jewish Heritage Day at the White House and asked about Israel. “Get the hell out of Palestine,” she said, and went on to tell the startled questioner that “it’s not their land, and said that Jews should “go home” to “Poland, Germany, and America and everywhere else.”

Last week that video went viral. What made it so offensive is that it not only seemed to challenge Israel’s right to exist, it appeared anti-Semitic. There are few Jews today in Poland and Germany, because they were all murdered there during the Holocaust.

Within hours, people were calling for Thomas’s firing. The speakers bureau that represented her dumped her.

She issued an apology that sounded corporate and wooden and satisfied no one. All of this is very painful.

Painful in a special sense to me. I know Helen fairly well. She is a proud Detroiter who has never forgotten where she came from.

A few years ago, she helped start a scholarship fund at her alma mater, and she comes back every year to interact with the students. We’ve talked about foreign affairs, and while she has long been unhappy with Israeli policy, she never questioned that nation’s right to exist. What she said on Jewish Heritage Day was terrible. But I think we should ask whether one callous mistake wipes out the honor of an incredible career. Seven years ago, Thomas was virtually the only reporter asking the President: Where was the proof of weapons of mass destruction? Was this war in Iraq really necessary?

I saw reporters roll their eyes when she asked such questions. Who turned out to be right?

Helen Thomas has screwed up, big-time, and it is fine to be angry. But only if you remember that she is also the reason women today can join the National Press Club and the Gridiron. To err is human. Maybe we shouldn’t forget that forgiveness is, as well.

Essay: Say It Ain't So - 6.4.10

Former Congressman Joe Schwarz is abandoning his plans to run as an Independent candidate for governor. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry says it’s all about the money.

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Back in February, Lansing-based reporter Susan Demas began a column this way. “I don’t think Joe Schwarz will run for governor as an independent, but I wish to God he would. There is simply no one better equipped to steer the state at a critical point in our history.”

Demas was far from alone in her assessment. Once upon a time, a man like Schwarz would have been the GOP’s dream candidate. He’s a fiscal conservative who is for a strong national defense, but also a moderate on social issues.

He has a stunning background; he’s a decorated Vietnam veteran who went back for a second hitch with the CIA. He’s been a congressman, mayor of Battle Creek, and served 16 years in the state senate, where he was an expert on higher education funding and a fierce defender of our state’s universities.

And he’s also is an ear, nose and throat doctor who practices full-time in Battle Creek.

Schwarz was a lifelong Republican until a few years ago, when he didn‘t leave his party so much as it left him. Four years ago, running for re-election to Congress, he was defeated in the primary by a former Bible salesman backed by a lot of out-of-state money.

They charged that Schwarz was a liberal, primarily because he supports embryonic stem cell research, and believes that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

Schwarz came to realize that he didn’t really have a political home any more, that he cared about Michigan more than he did partisan politics, and that his home state was in deep trouble.

Michigan’s per-capita income is now lower than most states; its unemployment is higher than anywhere else. The state has a vast budget deficit, and the lawmakers seem paralyzed to act.

Partly that seems to be due to the worst partisan ideological deadlock anyone can remember, coupled with an absence of leadership. Joe Schwarz thought it might be time for an independent governor, and that he might be the man who could do it.

As a legislator, Schwarz knew how to put together deals. There’d be yelling and swearing and table-pounding, and the job would get done. Last winter he told me he would run as an independent if he could raise enough to have a reasonable chance.

How much money would you need? I asked. He thought six to eight million at a minimum.

If that sounds obscene, remember that four years ago, Dick DeVos spent $45 million to lose.

But the funding proved impossible. Yesterday, Schwarz told me he was abandoning his effort. “I’ve decided that the logistics, especially the fiscal ones, of running for governor won’t work.“

He said he had never been one to walk away from a fight, but added “the money is simply an almost insurmountable barrier.“

So the candidate with the most experience at governing and getting it done can’t run. Whether he could have won isn’t clear, though more states are electing independent governors.

What is clear is that for many, the present system isn‘t working. Once, when I was interviewing Schwarz, a woman came up and begged him to run. “Every intelligent person in Michigan wants you,” she said. Something like that once happened to Adlai Stevenson, who looked at his adoring supporter.

“That’s not enough, madam,” he said. “I need a majority.”

Essay: Mackinac and Education - 6.3.10

There was a panel discussion on Mackinac this morning about education reform, Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry worries that we are avoiding some of the biggest elephants in the room.

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When I talk to people who know what’s going on in the state of Michigan today, I hear more and more concern about education.

This includes our political leaders. There’s now widespread recognition that our young adults are less educated, on average, than those in surrounding states. We see a steady stream of our young people earning college and graduate degrees, and leaving immediately for Chicago, Atlanta, Silicon Valley.

Many don’t want to go. But they have no choice. There are few jobs here, and fewer still that would help them launch careers.

But we have another problem. Thousands graduate from high school, ill-prepared for college or for any occupational future. Tens of thousands more, many from inner-city schools, don’t even graduate.

Our elected political leaders are aware of these problems. But they seem unwilling to take the steps to solve them.

That‘s mainly because they know that tackling these issues would cost money, and might even require asking the voters to sacrifice or raise taxes. Today, the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Mackinac Policy Conference’s agenda included a high-powered panel discussion look at education reform.

I wasn’t able to be there this morning, but the conference agenda indicated the session would look at what is working in other states, and also discuss, “how we can leverage federal resources to ensure our schools and students are growing future leaders for our businesses and communities.”

Well, that’s not a bad idea, but how come nobody wants to talk about using more Michigan resources to ensure that the next generation has a future? There was also one person on the panel who wasn’t invited, but who should have been, and should be a part of any serious discussion on the education future:

Tom Watkins was state superintendent of public instruction until he was forced out by Governor Granholm in 2005, after they disagreed on some policy issues, including the need to move towards the sort of pension reforms enacted this year.

Since then, Watkins has been actively working on business and education contacts between this nation and China.

Yesterday, he shared some thoughts on education reform with me. He said the bottom line is this: “The Michigan culture of high pay for minimal education and low skills is dead, and a new economic order will have to rise from its ruins.

“We have moved from a state where you once were able to “lift for a living” to one in where more and more of our citizens will be required to think for a living.” He thinks the legislature is going to have to be willing to spend where necessary -- but that the intellectual dinosaurs of the teachers’ unions and the education bureaucracies are also going to have to face reality.

What would he be telling our leaders on Mackinac, if he had been invited to speak? He’d say they “should stop funding a broken system that perpetuates the past, and begin the hard work they’ve been avoiding for far too long -- restructuring, reforming and reinventing our state in ways that conform to the new reality we face, and which will help make us stronger in the future.”

Tom Watkins is on Mackinac today, attending some of the presentations. I think all the candidates for governor would do well to pull him aside, and listen.

Essay: Mackinac and Beyond - 6.2.10

The Mackinac Policy Conference opens today with a panel discussion to look at what’s wrong with our state. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks they need to ask a different question.

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The Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce’s annual Mackinac Policy Conference starts this afternoon with a high-powered panel discussion that conference organizers say will focus on the most important question of all.

Which is, as John Rakolta puts it, “What’s Wrong With Michigan?” Rakolta, the CEO of Walbridge, the Detroit-based construction firm, has been asking that question for years.

Rakolta is someone for whom I have a good deal of respect. While he is deeply conservative, he tries to reach across partisan and ideological lines to find ways to help this state.

I attended a dinner at his home a few years ago which was devoted to a frank and candid discussion of where the state is now in terms of race, and how we get beyond the usual issues.

I have no doubt that the discussion on today’s panel will be lively and provocative, if a bit weighted towards the corporate community’s way of looking at things. Besides Rakolta, it includes the head of the Detroit Regional Chamber, three business heavyweights, and as sort of a token counterweight standing alone in the lions’ den, Mark Gaffney, the longtime leader of the state AFL-CIO.

Actually, the issue really isn’t “What’s Wrong With Michigan?“ Sadly, we know the answer to that all too well. Detroit News business columnist Daniel Howes lays it out in today’s newspaper in devastatingly incisive detail. We are steadily losing jobs and talented young people, and getting deeper and deeper in the hole.

Our politics are polarized and our government largely paralyzed when it comes to not only considering reform but even doing anything that might resemble working together. Michigan has far too many local school districts. Too many units of government needlessly duplicating functions. There’s also an entitlement mentality on the part of workers in both the public and private sectors.

That’s too often coupled, unfortunately, with a belief on the part of business that the solution to all economic problems is to eliminate as many workers as possible and pay the rest wages too low to allow them to live a decent life and buy the products they make.

No, the question is not what’s wrong with Michigan. It is what do we do about what‘s wrong, and more importantly, how do we finally make up our minds to do what‘s necessary to fix it?

Howes quotes John Rakolta as saying that after ten years of steady decline, we still don’t get it. He says “It’s not just taxes. It’s not just the auto companies. It’s the culture?

“What’s it going to take to change the culture?”

How we change the culture and get our state back on the road to prosperity is what matters. Rakolta’s panel this afternoon pledges to discuss how we, quote “successfully tackle the root causes of our challenges, not just cover them with band-aids.“

The heavyweights on the panel are anything but stupid, and may come up with some ways to get us there. However, there’s been many a year when great ideas were born and deals struck at Mackinac -- and then gradually unraveled or got forgotten on the long drive down I-75, coming back home.

This time, we can’t afford to let that happen. Michigan’s cupboard’s close to bare, and there‘s no longer any time to waste.