Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: A Talk with Mayor Bing - 4.8.11

Detroit was hit last month with census numbers worse than anyone expected, which may worsen the city’s economic crisis. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked with the mayor about where his city now stands.

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I went to see Detroit Mayor Dave Bing yesterday afternoon to discuss the state of his city. It’s been a bruising few weeks for Detroit. The census showed a population loss considerably greater than expected -- which means a further loss of both federal and state dollars. The governor’s budget has yet to be approved, but it seems clear that it means more cuts in revenue sharing.

Nevertheless, I found the mayor upbeat, candid and energetic. He’s convinced the census missed people, and is going to do all he can to get the count adjusted. But for now, he has to plan as if the number is going to stay at seven hundred and thirteen thousand.

There’s no doubt in his mind what Detroit needs most. “Jobs are the key,” he said. There are some hopeful signs. General Motors, Blue Cross, Quicken Loans and some other firms have announced plans to add jobs recently. But the city has a long way to go.

When the recession was at its peak, Mayor Bing made headlines when he said that he thought the city’s true unemployment rate was as high as forty-five percent, when you counted workers who are so discouraged they aren‘t even taking part in the labor force. What does he think it is now? “Still about the same,” he said.

“There are some signs the country is coming out of the recession, but that hasn’t really translated into jobs in Detroit.”

I asked the mayor, himself a former successful businessman, about Governor Rick Snyder’s theory that lowering taxes will help bring a new flood of jobs. He smiled. “Well, it should help,” he said.

But he added that maximizing profits doesnn’t always mean adding jobs. The mayor, who took office after a special election following the resignation of Kwame Kilpatrick, has been in office almost two years now. What does he think is his greatest accomplishment?

He said, “reducing the deficit from more than $330 million dollars to $155 million. Given the economy, that was really a Herculean task.”

Unfortunately, he fears the deficit may now rise somewhat, “if everything in the governor’s budget becomes stark reality.”

I told him there was speculation that sooner or later, Detroit would need an Emergency Financial Manager. “Everything we do here day to day is to avoid that happening,” Bing said. But he knows he can‘t completely rule out the possibility. If that were to happen, would he take the job if it were offered? My impression was that he would. In fact, the mayor added that the new, tougher financial manager law would make it easier to do some of the things that need to be done.

Whether or not that happens, he intends to keep fighting. He’s already announced his intention to run for re-election in two years; saying turning things around will take more than one term.

If he is re-elected, Dave Bing would be seventy-four by the end of his second term. Does he expect to see a point where Detroit saw true prosperity again? The former basketball superstar smiled.

He believes in making progress, he said, a layup at a time, not in trying for grandstand, three-point plays. “Solvency. I think solvency is possible.” Prosperity is further away.

Essay: The Price of Civilization - 4.6.11

There are cities, unions, and teachers around the state that are outraged at Governor Snyder’s proposal to cut benefits. This has got Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wondering why nobody’s talking about raising taxes…

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Last night a gentleman who appeared to be in his late sixties approached me after Michigan Radio’s Issues and Ale event in Royal Oak. He appeared frustrated. “My father always taught me that taxes were the price we pay for civilization,” he said.

“Why don’t people seem to realize that today?”

The answer is that taxes are, indeed, the price we pay for a civilized society.

Whether he realized it or not, his father was echoing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said exactly those words back in 1904. That doesn’t mean all taxes are good. What it does mean is that without our tax money, we wouldn’t have any schools or roads or policemen or local and national parks.

However, about thirty years ago, politicians began telling us that we were the most overtaxed generation in history, and we came to believe it. The truth is that Americans pay a far smaller proportion of their incomes in taxes than people in most modern countries. We even pay far less than we used to.

Back in the Kennedy Administration, the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent. Nobody pays even a third of their income to Uncle Sam now. We do pay additional state and local taxes.

But thanks to the anti-tax fever, our politicians have cut taxes, and then cut again. However, they haven’t cut services very much.

That’s because voters don’t want to give up anything they are getting, they just don’t want to pay for them. Oh, they are willing to have other people’s benefits cut, just not theirs.

So local and state governments have used up their rainy day funds, shoved expenses off to future years and engaged in accounting tricks. But now that’s not working any more. Local governments are running out of cash, fast.

Governor Rick Snyder is proposing to slash revenue sharing payments, and make some of it dependent on cities doing more to further cut expenses, or as he puts it, adopt best practices.

The impact of all this has many communities and many school districts teetering on the brink of insolvency. Democrats say they are outraged at the governor’s plans to slash services.

However, I don’t hear them saying, “look. Times are hard, but good schools and roads are a necessity. So those of us who are still working are going to have to pay a little more to maintain them, to keep things up till we have a better future.”

Last night I challenged State Senator Bert Johnson about this. A liberal Democrat whose district includes Highland Park and the Grosse Pointes, he represents some of the poorest people in the state -- and some of the wealthiest. He took exception to my charge that Democrats hadn’t been willing to support tax increases.

“That information is on a number of websites,” he said. Well, that isn’t the same thing as loudly calling for those who can afford it to pay. Communities and people all over the state are in the process of finding out that there really is no free lunch.

The question is whether we want our needs and those of our children neglected, or whether we are willing to pay the price of having a civilized society.

Essay: What’s Wrong With the Democrats - 3.29.11

Yesterday, the Democrats in the Michigan Senate called for a constitutional amendment to protect the School Aid Fund. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks we should ask, “where’s the beef?”

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A lot of people are uneasy about Governor Rick Snyder’s proposal to cut aid to education at all levels in order to balance the budget and give business a huge tax break. Even some of those in favor of cutting business taxes have problems with this.

They reason that no matter what happens, there aren’t going to be any jobs in the future for unskilled, undereducated workers -- and certainly not any good-paying ones. Our young adults are undereducated as it is, and cutting education won’t help.

So yesterday, we were alerted that the Michigan Senate Democrats were going to offer an alternate proposal. I was very interested to see what it would be. And frankly, I was hoping it would be an alternative I could support.

That’s because I am convinced that better education and training, more than anything else, is the key to Michigan’s future.

Well, I couldn’t have been more disappointed in the Democrats -- or in Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer, a charismatic and intelligent figure who may be their best hope for the future.

The minority leader called for a state constitutional amendment that would prevent the governor from taking money out of the school aid fund in the future. In practical terms, this is the equivalent of my calling for an amendment requiring it to be seventy degrees so I don’t freeze when I walk the dog in the morning.

First of all, this does nothing to address this year’s problems. Even if the legislature thought this was a good idea, they’d have to agree to put it on a statewide ballot so people could vote on it.

That wouldn’t happen until long after this budget has been passed. But the legislature isn’t going to do any such thing. Republicans control both chambers. Democrats are especially weak in the Senate, where Gretchen Whitmer’s party has less than a third of the seats, and by themselves are powerless to do anything.

That’s not the worst part of her proposal, however. When she presented it to the media yesterday, she was asked this sensible question: If her proposal became law, how would Democrats then propose to fill the resulting deficit hole in the general fund?

The Senate minority leader refused to offer an answer -- other than to say the tax code should be “re-examined.“

This is precisely what has been wrong with Michigan government for the past decade, and what got the Democrats tossed out of office last fall. This is also why Governor Snyder’s plan is likely to be enacted. The governor has made a comprehensive proposal for changing the way things are done.

His numbers add up.

His critics are whining about many parts of his proposal. But they have yet to propose an alternative. That’s not because there aren’t any. It’s because any alternative involves raising taxes.

And they don’t have the guts to do that. Incredible as it might seem, nobody in a leadership position in the Democratic Party seems willing to argue that the well-off should pay more, so the have-nots won’t have to suffer. That’s why Governor Snyder is winning.

You can’t fight something with nothing. And so far, the alternative the minority party is offering is precisely that.

Essay: Why Business Supports the Budget - 3.28.11

Governor Snyder’s budget is intended to bring new jobs and business to the state of Michigan. But will it work? Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked to some business leaders.

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The changes Governor Rick Snyder wants to make with his proposed budget are hugely controversial. But everyone agrees on this: They are designed to bring new business to Michigan.

The governor believes there is no other way to revitalize our state’s economy. But what does business really think of the governor’s budget? People in business aren’t monolithic. General Motors doesn’t have a lot in common with the mom-and-pop restaurant in my neighborhood with five employees.

So last week, I talked to two business leaders who each represent a broad cross-section of somewhat dissimilar interests. Doug Rothwell is president and CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan, a group of seventy-six of the state’s largest employers. Rob Fowler has the same title with the Small Business Association of Michigan, sometimes known as SBAM.

SBAM has more than ten thousand members, many of whom have fewer than a hundred employees. Fowler and Rothwell don’t always see eye to eye -- but they do on the governor’s budget.

They support it, right down the line. “I think the governor’s tax plan is the right thing to do, even though some of our members are going to pay more,” said Rothwell, who ran Detroit Renaissance before it evolved into Business Leaders two years ago.

Rob Fowler, who has also had small business leadership positions in Indiana and Ohio, put it this way: “You have to understand the moment in time we are in.”

“Sure, there are things in the governor’s plan I am sure, standing by themselves, our members would not support.”

But both men said it was vitally important to pass the plan as a whole, that if lawmakers started picking off pieces, it would fall apart.

I talked to each man separately, and discovered that what both liked most about the plan was that it offers a coherent, comprehensive strategy for Michigan’s long-term economic recovery. Rothwell noted that this was not a budget of quick fixes and one-time solutions, but one with vision.

Critics have said that the governor is just betting an hunch, gambling that slashing taxes will bring new business into the state.

But both business leaders say there’s some hard data indicating that Snyder may be right. Fowler said a survey of his small business members found seventy-two percent said they expect they’d add workers with the governor’s plan and sixty-three percent said they’d expect to pay their current workers more.

Two thirds of the small businessmen said they would be likely to invest in new equipment. Both Fowler and Rothwell oppose the Republican legislators’ proposal to set the corporate income tax higher and exempt those currently getting pensions from tax.

Rothwell said that change would take Michigan from the fifteenth most business-friendly state to the thirtieth. “They are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Fowler added.

That doesn’t mean both men love the entire plan. Fowler’s defense of eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit for the poor was unconvincing. Rothwell doesn’t like seeing cuts to education.

But they are both standing behind the plan, in part, perhaps, for one other reason. Despite all the critics, nobody’s proposed a comprehensive alternative. Michigan’s economy is seriously sick. And as of now, the Snyder plan is the only doctor in the house.

Essay: Mergers and Acquisitions - 3.22.11

In Grand Rapids yesterday, Governor Snyder proposed a controversial set of new local government reforms. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the ones that got less attention could end up being more significant.

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There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth statewide over the new proposals the governor outlined in Grand Rapids yesterday, the ones especially that will affect local governments.

He proposes to hold back one-third of the revenue sharing money communities get from the state, and release it only if cities, villages and townships adopt certain reforms. Those would include putting all new hires on a pension plan based on what they and their employer put in, a so-called “defined contribution plan.”

Experts feel that too many places now offer what are known as defined benefits plans, which are costlier, and which governments are obligated to honor regardless of their ability to pay.

Under the Snyder plan, new local government hires would also have to pay at least twenty percent of the cost of their health care. There would be certain other rules governing things how much money governments contribute and how fast pensions could rise.

These reforms are, in short, all things public employee unions have strenuously opposed. Predictably, Democrats mostly denounced these proposals yesterday. Republicans and business groups praised them .. but so did alliances of local governments.

As the head of the Michigan Municipal League said yesterday, local governments are desperate today for any tools that will help them get a handle on their spiraling costs.

My guess is that these reforms are likely to become law, given the large Republican majorities in the legislature. However, I am not sure the carrot the governor is offering is going to be large enough to give local governments the incentives to get this done.

Consider this: To start with, the governor is already slashing the total amount spent on revenue sharing by a third. That will cut what Detroit is getting, for example, from a maximum of $178 million dollars to $119 million. They can get two thirds of the new amount basically by just promising to try and do better at consolidating services.

Will the city then find it worthwhile to adopt some terribly controversial measures to get another less than $40 million dollars? Well, maybe. But the Macomb County city of Utica might not. Their revenue sharing incentive will be something like twenty thousand dollars, not enough, perhaps to take on the unions.

But the governor proposed some other reforms in Grand Rapids yesterday which got less attention -- but which, in the long run, could be much more significant. For example, he wants to make it much more easy for governments to merge.

Governor Snyder also wants to clear the way for combined city and county governments, as they’ve done in Indianapolis, Miami and Louisville. In the long run, this may be the only solution for Detroit.

He also wants to streamline the process for consolidating services, as when a city and a township decide to share a fire department. We’re bound to see a lot of this happening soon.

Many of the governor’s reforms are controversial, and probably no one is on board with all of them. But nobody can deny that he is proposing a comprehensive set of solutions to our state’s economic problems, something we haven’t seen in a long time. And if anyone is offering any serious alternatives, I haven’t seen them yet.

Essay: You Never Can Tell - 3.16.11

Some Michigan Democrats are hoping Governor Snyder’s controversial budget means he will be a one-term leader. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says history suggests something different.

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The governor’s made some decisions that are wildly unpopular. Unions are upset. Taxpayers are upset. His own party isn’t too sure he is right.

Behind closed doors, leaders of the opposition party are rubbing their hands in glee. They think they know a one-term governor when they see one.

That’s what’s going on right now in Wisconsin, to be sure, and also, to a lesser extent, in Lansing. Democrats are convinced that if Governor Snyder indeed manages to tax pensions, cut education, and end the Earned Income Tax Credit, he’ll be toast.

Well, maybe. But also, maybe not. One of my more sensitive students asked me this touching question recently: “Isn’t it a drag being old?” To which I said, “no, not really.”

To which he said, “why?”

What I wanted to say was something like, “because we Baby Boomer and Generation Xers have sucked up all the the available jobs, that’s why, and most of us aren’t leaving anytime soon.

“Which means you can look forward after graduation to fifteen years as a Wal-Mart associate.” I didn’t say that, because I am a mature adult. So I said I didn’t mind being old, because ... being old means you know stuff. And one thing I know is that politics is sort of like the weather. If you don’t like the way things are going now, wait ten minutes, or maybe ten months.

Twenty-eight years ago, we had another economic crisis and a new governor named James Blanchard temporarily raised taxes through the roof. Well, he was widely regarded as politically dead, especially after voters recalled two state senators.

But guess what. The tax hike worked; the budget got balanced; the economy picked up, and Blanchard was re-elected by an astonishing margin of more than two to one. That wasn’t all that surprising. Two years before Blanchard’s tax hike, we had a president who angered organized labor big-time by firing every striking member of the Air Traffic Controllers union in the country. If you thought the unions are mad at the governor now, you weren’t alive back then. But three years later, many union members voted to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

Eight years later, we had a new Republican governor who began doing controversial and unpopular things. He closed clinics and mental health facilities and chopped benefits. There was an uproar almost like the one now.

But the next election was a long time away. When it came, John Engler was reelected by a huge landslide, getting more than sixty percent of the vote against a respected former congressman.

Now it’s possible things will be different this time. If Snyder gets his budget passed, and the economy doesn’t turn around relatively soon, he and the Republicans could be in deep trouble. But his next election is more than three and half years away.

Michigan also seems to like divided government. We voted for Republican presidents and Democratic governors throughout the 1980s. We voted for Democratic presidents and Republican governors throughout the 1990s. In politics, it ain’t over till it’s over, and there really are no final victories. Those out of power should be a little cautious about measuring the drapes for their expected return.

Essay: Emergency Financial Managers - 3.10.11

A bitterly divided Michigan House and Senate have passed new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation. Michigan Radio‘s Jack Lessenberry has some non-partisan thoughts.

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Nobody in Lansing was neutral yesterday when the Michigan senate completed passage of new, tougher Emergency Financial Manager legislation on a straight, party line vote.

State Senator Phil Pavlov said this is needed to maintain “vital services, such as public safety and education,” when a city or a school district is in desperate financial straits.

This reform, he said, is necessary to allow steps to be taken “to protect public interests and the public’s money and strengthen local control and accountability.” His fellow Republicans all agreed.

But if you talked to any of the Democrats, they sounded like this was the equivalent of Mussolini seizing power. “An unfair and unjustified power grab,“ Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer called it. One of her colleagues said it went way too far, “and was going to damage our communities and our schools.”

Well, you could say that it is nice to see that our time-honored tradition of bitter partisan divisions is alive and well, but I think the opposite. We’ve had four sterile years of that in Lansing. I think we’d all be better off if this could have been a bipartisan bill.

It’s also frustratingly clear that in the past, some emergency managers in places like Pontiac and Hamtramck could have used more authority. Robert Bobb needed to be able to tackle academic reform in the Detroit district; the courts said he couldn’t.

Now, his successor will have that power. Democrats are mainly afraid of provisions in the bill that would allow emergency managers to void contracts and ignore collective bargaining agreements if necessary. EFMs can even dissolve a municipal government.

Democrats rightly fear this could be the death knell for public employee unions in such cases. To be sure, the majority Republicans seemed uninterested in even attempting to compromise or win over Democrats. However, here’s something we might ask the indignant minority party: Where have you been for the last several years?

What’s clear is that a lot more school districts and municipalities are likely to have to endure emergency financial managers, or EFMs for short.

This has been clear to everyone for some time, and it has also been clear that the old law was inadequate. Did the Democrats propose changes last year, when they controlled the governorship and the state house? Did they suggest conducting a review of Detroit’s troubled finances?

They did not, clearly for political reasons. They did nothing, any more than they attempted to address the state’s deep-seated financial problems. Now, the balance of power has shifted.

What’s needed now is a little more common sense and a little less hysteria. As I read this law, EFMs will now be appointed by the state treasurer, not the governor. And the man now in that job, Andy Dillon, happens to be a Democrat. He also has the ability to grant local officials most of the powers emergency managers have.

If emergency managers are appointed who gleefully begin dissolving contracts for sheer ideological reasons, there’s bound to be plenty of public criticism, and a backlash, as witness Wisconsin.

What’s needed now is the means and goodwill to keep financially strapped governments functioning, and, especially, to educate kids, no matter what.

If everyone keeps that in mind, we’ll all be better off.

Essay: Funding Education - 3.9.11

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Mike Simeck, the superintendent of schools in Berkley, Michigan, has something in common with Governor Snyder - or at least, with the way the governor ran his businesses:

He believes in proven results. “I run an organization that is the largest employer in our city, where I would hear from our client base immediately if we begin to fail,” he told me last night at ten o’clock, after each of us had put in more than a full day.

“I run this thing based on empirical evidence, on data and results, and as a result, we’ve been successful."

That‘s no idle boast. Berkley is a small but diverse district with a little less than five thousand students. Roughly speaking, they are two-thirds white; one-quarter black, one eighth Hispanic and Asian.

He has affluent kids from Huntington Woods, working and middle class kids from Berkley, poor kids and Orthodox Jews from a slice of Oak Park. They run lean and mean and get results.

Want proof? More than four out of every five Berkley students who apply to the University of Michigan get in. Their ACT scores are way over the national average. Simeck, who’s been in his job for four years, says this is no accident. When other school districts outperform Berkley, they study them and make changes.

That’s helped lead to Berkley High being recognized by Newsweek as one of the nation’s “public elite” high schools.

Yet Simeck is deeply concerned that Governor Snyder’s budget is going to destroy all that. He’s been in Lansing, talking to new legislators and state officials. They tell him the governor’s budget is based on a hunch that if business taxes are dramatically lowered, it will bring new investment and prosperity flowing into the state.

Mike Simeck thinks it’s only reasonable to ask, “what data do you have supporting this plan?“ That’s what he would be asked if he wanted to make radical changes in his district.

And if the governor’s budget is adopted, it will indeed mean radical change -- and not change for the better. Berkley will face a deficit of $4.9 million dollars, well over a tenth of its entire budget. This is a district that cut its fat years ago.

They privatized food service. There’s no bus service, except for special education. The district has had vacancies for an art teacher and a social worker for six months, because Simeck has a policy of no placeholders, of not hiring anyone till they find the right person.

The governor’s budget would mean laying off teachers, increasing class size, and perhaps getting rid of all music, art, athletics and physical education. Whatever they do, “We cannot avoid impacting learning and achievement,” he told me.

Those two things, are of course, what Michigan’s kids and our state need if we are to have a future.

So Mike Simeck is going to do what he can to persuade our lawmakers to think again about cutting the school aid fund. He knows it won’t be easy. Most of the legislators are new. Many are still learning how education funding works.

But he thinks they should be able to grasp this:

You may be able to put off buying a new car. But Michigan only gets one chance at properly educating a child.

Essay: Taxing Credibility - 3.8.11

Lansing is seeing waves of protestors who are angry about the governor’s proposed budget cuts. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says they need to check their arithmetic.

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Two plus two equals four. Simple, right? That’s math even a journalist can understand. Unfortunately, the legislature and a large section of the general public doesn’t quite seem to get it.

State government is currently on course to run a huge deficit for the next fiscal year. State budget deficits are illegal, under Michigan’s Constitution. That budget has to be balanced by September 30.

Four months ago, we elected a ton of Republicans to the legislature who pledged they wouldn’t vote for any new taxes, no matter what. We elected a Republican governor who said he was going to deeply cut taxes on business, because he believed that was the only way to attract new jobs and industry to this state.

So we voted for no new taxes of any kind, less taxes on business, and we‘ve got a big budget deficit to start. And now we are shocked, shocked, that the governor is insisting on making huge cuts in state spending. Well, we shouldn‘t be.

We voted for this. And, we tolerated the last governor, and several different past legislatures, refusing to deal with our problems. We put things off till we couldn‘t do it any more.

And now, we have to fix it. What‘s worse, we have to do this when we are still mired in the effects of the worst recession since World War II. Yes, I know the recession is officially over.

The economists say so, anyway. But hard times are not even close to over in Michigan. The auto industry is never coming back the way it was, and we need a new economy.

That doesn‘t mean I approve of the governor‘s approach. But we voted for it, and now we are whining, Protestors are thronging the state capital every day protesting some cut or other.

They have a right to do that. But the first rule of Management 101 is that if you complain about a problem, you should have a proposed solution. Ask the people protesting the budget cuts what they would do instead, and you mainly get a blank stare.

That, or some other answer that betrays fundamental ignorance of fourth grade arithmetic. The governor’s most unpopular proposal is taxing pension income. The AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, is fighting this tooth and nail. They don’t think a retired teacher who gets combined social security and pension income of $90,000 a year should pay taxes on what she makes. However, they don’t have any problem with the single mother who works part -time in my local dry cleaners paying state taxes on her eight dollar an hour job.

Does that sound fair? Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville noted yesterday that if the proposal to tax pensions is defeated, they’ve got to come up with another nine hundred million more in budget cuts.

I could say show me the money, but there isn’t any, and that’s the problem. For the last decade, we’ve pretended that there was such a thing as a free lunch, and we could make it last forever.

Except that the bill is now due, and the policeman is on the next stool. Two plus two is still four. If you have a better way to add up the numbers, I‘m all ears.

Essay: Shared Sacrifice? - 3.7.11

Governor Rick Snyder’s proposed budget would eliminate a tax credit for the working poor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry went to see some people who worry about the consequences.

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If you want to see why this recession was different from others in recent history, spend a little time over at the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries. They’ve been seeing and feeding people they’ve never seen before, people who never imagined they’d need help.

The other day, I went to see Dr. Chad Audi, the mission’s President and CEO. Not only is their caseload flooded, he said, “more and more we are seeing the working homeless.”

These are people who have jobs, but still have no place to live. The Rescue Mission does what it can to get them into housing, but the need is far greater than it used to be -- and for many, the ability to give is less. Incidentally, there are some who think of the mission as just a soup kitchen, possibly because of their mass appeals for help with Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the homeless. A soup kitchen was pretty much what it the mission was when it was founded a century ago. Founder David Stucky kept people alive with food from his own pantry during the worst of the Great Depression.

But in modern times, the mission has added transitional and permanent housing as well as an array of programs designed to get people off drugs and alcohol, off Detroit’s mean streets and back into the workforce. They even have a ranch near Howell, where inner-city kids can spend a few days among woods and streams.

But the past few years have been especially grim. The number of people needing daily food assistance has increased by forty percent. Audi, who first came to the mission to take a temporary accounting position, told me about a middle-class looking man one volunteer noticed standing in line on one of the coldest days of the year, clutching the hands of his daughter and son.

They offered to take them inside immediately, but the man said he wanted to wait his turn. He had lost his job and his home, and was staying with relatives. He didn‘t think it was fair to ask them to feed his family too, so they came to the mission. Stories like that are why Chad Audi is in this job. He has a doctorate in business, and came back from his native Lebanon fourteen years ago to take a government job that paid three times as much as working at the mission. But this work called to him instead.

Now, he is worried about the future. The mission is non-profit, non-partisan, and gets no government support, aside from some federal housing money. However, if the governor’s plans to end the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor is approved, the Rescue Mission fears their caseload will skyrocket.

Projections estimate this could plunge tens of thousands of children alone into poverty. That would strain the mission’s resources. And what it would do to Michigan‘s future?

Times are tough for the state, and lots of people are going to have to make sacrifices. Yet it’s fair to ask whether cutting a program designed to allow the working poor to keep their heads above water is going to backfire on the rest of us.

Let’s hope the governor and the legislature carefully think this one through.