Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Emergency Financial Managers - 2.24.11

The Michigan House of Representatives passed legislation making it easier to appoint emergency financial managers yesterday, and the senate is expected to follow. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about this.

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If you had any doubts about difficult the situation is for local governments these days, consider this. Even before they tackle the budget, our lawmakers in Lansing have been working hard on new emergency financial manager legislation.

Yesterday, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a package of bills designed to make it easier to appoint emergency financial managers to run troubled cities and school districts. The legislation also gives those managers broad new powers. The Senate is expected to easily approve this as well.

There was a lot of heated debate, but what was left mostly unspoken was the real reason they want this done quickly. They believe the state will have to appoint more emergency financial managers before long. Last month, state treasurer Andy Dillon said five communities may not be able to pay their employees by the end of March. And that may be only the tip of the iceberg.

The state has been appointing emergency financial managers for some time, and in some cases, with good results. There is general agreement that an EFM helped Hamtramck get back on its feet a decade ago, though the city is in trouble again now.

There are a number of them currently in place in cities that include Benton Harbor and Pontiac, and the Detroit Public Schools. But how far should their powers extend?

Robert Bobb, the EFM over Detroit’s schools, have expressed frustration that the courts have ruled his powers don’t extend to academic matters. Other people are worried, however, that the new emergency financial manager legislation will give the state too much power. Specifically, residents of troubled older cities, which tend to be heavily Democratic, fear Lansing Republicans will use this to seize power in places where they could never win it on their own.

There’s a racial element to this too. State Representative Maureen Stapleton of Detroit yesterday complained that the emergency manager law was most likely to be used in “communities of color.” Unions are, if possible, even more upset. The new legislation would allow an emergency financial manager to void labor contracts, require competitive bidding and strip local officials of virtually all their power.

All this passed the house on an essentially party-line vote yesterday. The bill’s supporters say color and politics don’t have anything to do with it. They say this is about nipping crises in the bud.

In fact, the legislation’s main sponsor, Republican Al Pscholka of Stevensville, said we should see this as “tough love” designed to encourage communities to make the difficult choices necessary to avoid a state takeover.

However, this could have the opposite effect. Rather than take the heat for tough decisions, local authorities may throw up their hands and ask for a financial manager to do the dirty work.

That’s already happened in Pontiac. Sadly, these bills are probably largely necessary. That doesn’t mean this legislation is perfect. A Democratic lawmaker from Oakland County named Lisa Brown had some legitimate criticism. She noted that some communities have been driven to the brink partly because they’ve been denied adequate revenue sharing and school aid.

The lawmakers, she said, “need to take responsibility for what you do in this room.” That’s good advice for all of us in these times.

Essay: State of Detroit - 2.23.11

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing gave his state of the city address last night. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks it can all be summed up in the words of an ancient rock n’roll song.

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You may think I am a little crazy, but while I was listening to Mayor Dave Bing’s State of the City address last night, what kept running through my head was an ancient rock and roll song.

An early hit called Chantilly Lace, by a now half-forgotten artist called the Big Bopper, whose main claim to fame is dying in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly more than half a century ago.

That song features a poor guy who keeps telling his girlfriend that he‘d like to do all sorts of things, except for one problem: “I ain’t got no money, honey.” Which is actually a pretty concise statement of the problem. Actually, that pretty much sums up the situation in all Michigan, with Detroit being an especially acute case.

Seventy miles away in Lansing, lawmakers spent the daylight hours yesterday considering Governor Rick Snyder’s proposed spending cuts. There’s a three percent cut to Community Health Programs. A forty percent cut to graduate medical education. Cuts to revenue sharing, cuts to schools, cuts that will affect Detroit and other cities like a blow falling on a bruise.

Some legislators raised objections.

They spoke of the pain this would cause, and the long-term damage it would do to people and the state itself. But the answers from the administration were variations on the Big Bopper’s theme. In nuanced, professional and bureaucratic words, they told lawmakers like Detroit’s Rashida Tlaib, “We ain’t got no money, honey.”

There’s little doubt in anybody’s mind of that. Then last night, the mayor took the stage at the Max Fisher Music Hall. The venue itself was ironically symbolic. To get inside, you had to cross a picket line supporting musicians from now what may be the former Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The season was finally canceled last weekend after a long strike. And frankly, it isn’t clear to me if Detroit will ever have a symphony again. Incidentally, both sides agreed that the musicians would have to take a massive pay cut. The impasse was over how massive. This is no longer Walter Reuther’s Detroit.

The mayor, in keeping with the kind of man he is, gave a dignified speech, as optimistic as he could honestly be. “We are a work in progress,” he said. It made me wonder how different things might be had Bing succeeded Dennis Archer, another honest and intelligent man, in 2002. But instead, Detroit had to endure six years of plunder. Mayor Bing said he believes his city has turned a corner. In one sense, that is true. It is no longer a government of thieves.

But neither is it one that can balance its books, and the governor’s budget makes things that much harder. As the mayor said, with the governor in the audience, the budget “has potentially devastating consequences for Detroit. It threatens the fragile gains we have made, and we simply can‘t afford it.”

It’s easy to imagine the governor giving him the Big Bopper’s answer. Elsewhere in Lansing yesterday, other lawmakers toiled away on new Emergency Financial Manager legislation.

Everybody expects Michigan is going to see a lot more of these. Whether one will someday be in charge of Detroit is something no one yet wants to try to say.

Essay: Sins of the Fathers - 2.22.11

The state of Michigan has ordered Detroit public schools to adopt a deficit-reduction plan that will result in an average class size of more than sixty students. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what this really means.

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Something happened this week which will, unless something changes soon, have the effect of finishing the job of effectively destroying the Detroit public schools. And maybe, Michigan’s future.

The state department of education has ordered Detroit to put in place a financial restructuring plan that would close half the district’s schools within two years. That would result in an average high school class size of sixty-two students.

That would make anything resembling education all but impossible. As a conservative columnist for The Detroit News said recently, that’s not a classroom, that’s a holding pen.

Detroit’s schools have been dying for a long time. Parents who care about their children‘s future have been fleeing the district in droves. Back in 1999, they still had 175,000 students. This fall, that had shrunk to seventy-four thousand. That’s a loss of nearly ten thousand a year. The district is expected to lose another sixteen thousand over the next three years.

What happens to the students who are then left is anybody’s guess, but it won’t really be education. Not a lot of education seems to be happening now. Fewer than half graduate from high school,, and many of those who do get diplomas are barely literate. Whose fault it is that the Detroit schools are in such a state has been argued over endlessly. But what baffles me is that the rest of us don’t feel compelled to do something about it, both out of human compassion and sheer self-preservation.

Think about this. Detroit is being populated with hundreds of thousands of desperate young people who are not going to be employable at any conceivable legal, twenty-first century job.

How can that be good for our state? How can that leave the rich people in the Grosse Pointes, some of whom live only blocks from urban squalor, feeling secure?

We live, sadly, in two worlds in this country: The white world and the black one. Several weeks ago, I talked about how the West Germans pitched in and spent billions to build up East Berlin after Communism fell and the wall came down.

I said it was baffling that we weren’t willing to do that here. I immediately heard from an elderly white woman I know. “Tain’t baffling,“ she said. All Germans were white.

Incidentally, this woman is about at politically liberal as they come. She lived and worked in the city until about a year ago, when the sheer cost and difficulty got to be too much.

Now, deeply pessimistic, she worries that the answer to Rodney King’s famous question -- can’t we all just get along -- might be no, primarily because of the way white Americans treated black Americans for generations after slavery -- “brutalizing and ghettoizing them and keeping them in “separate but equal ignorance.“

That, she fears, as led to hatred and rejection of our culture on the part of much of black America, and a lack of interest on the part of white America in whatever happens to blacks.

“Politically incorrect?“ she said. Perhaps. But true, nevertheless. I don’t claim to be a sociologist or an economist, but I do know this. That unless we solve the problem of Detroit, Michigan has no chance of serious prosperity in any scenario we can foresee.

Essay: Budget Alternatives - 2.21.11

Governor Rick Snyder’s budget proposal has a lot of critics… but few have offered alternatives. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry talked to an expert who does have some different ideas.

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Well, it’s been four days since Gov. Rick Snyder presented his so-called “atomic bomb” budget, and opposition has started to harden. There are those who are concerned about the poor, largely because of the repeal of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

For example, Detroit Free Press editorial page editor Stephen Henderson said yesterday that this amounts to a “government-sponsored shift of capital away from the most needy citizens to those who are already more comfortable.”

Senior citizens’ groups are upset because the governor wants their constituents to have to begin paying Michigan income tax on their income, just like everybody else does on theirs.

The film industry is screaming about the potential loss of the film credits. The education community isn’t happy with the cuts they’d have to take, though they seem to be bearing them with more grace.

But the interesting thing to me is that none of these groups seems to be offering any kind of alternative plan. They want what they want, but don’t have any kind of broader vision.

Yet something radical does have to be done. The state is running an enormous deficit that has to be gotten rid of, and our old automotive-based economy doesn’t work anymore, not the way it did.

So the question for the critics is, if you don’t like the governor’s plan, what are you going to offer instead?

Well, they may be out of ideas, but I talked last night to a man who has some. Michigan State University Economist Charles Ballard.

Ballard, in my opinion, understands Michigan’s economy better than anyone. He is thought of as a liberal, though like me, he tends to think of himself as a member of the common-sense party. And in fact, he finds a whole lot to like in Governor Snyder’s budget. He is in favor of taxing retirement income. It levels the playing field, he said.

He likes getting rid of the odious Michigan Business Tax, and of the special tax credits as well. Government, most economists believe, usually shouldn’t try to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. But Ballard thinks the governor ought to have extended the sales tax to services and entertainment. That would make sense in our now largely service economy, and could mean $3 billion dollars a year. In fact, we could drop the present sales tax rate to five percent and still collect more money.

There’s also what I call the “Utah solution.” Utah, one of the nation’s most conservative states, has a five percent income tax rate. If we raised our tax rate to match Utah’s, the state would collect a billion more a year, and workers would barely notice.

Summing up, Ballard said, “if we raise the income tax rate to the Utah rate, and we tax services and entertainments, we could carry through the rest of the Snyder plan without having to cur revenue sharing, schools, higher ed,” and could save the Earned Income Tax Credit as well. That makes sense to me.

But what’s baffling is that none of the governor’s critics in the legislature seems to be proposing anything like this. Two plus two somehow has to equal four. And right now Rick Snyder’s arithmetic is the only set of numbers on Michigan’s table.

Essay: The Budget - 2.17.11

Governor Snyder presented his budget today, and people were stunned and surprised. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks they shouldn’t be.

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Well, the governor’s budget has landed, and people are shocked. They shouldn’t be. This is what we bargained for. This budget is, in part, a legacy of the last thirty years.

Starting with Ronald Reagan, we’ve been told repeatedly that taxes were bad. Not that they were sometimes too high, but that they were bad, period. So we cut them, and cut them again.

However, we didn‘t want to give up any of our precious services, and our politicians were afraid to ask us to sacrifice. We could have avoided huge pain now by sacrificing moderately years ago. Sort of like brushing your teeth so you don‘t get cavities.

But we were addicted to sugar, and didn‘t want to pay for dental insurance. So, it’s now multiple root canal time, and we are going to pay out of pocket. What‘s worse, the state and the nation are out of laughing gas.

Governor Snyder is a businessman, and thinks our best hope for the future is slashing business taxes in an effort to attract jobs and job creators. To his credit, he said so when he was running. The Democrats really failed to articulate an alternative.

We’ve known that there was this enormous deficit, and that the budget had to be balanced. For years, we’ve had a governor and a legislature who tried to ignore the laws of arithmetic. They knew there wasn’t enough money coming in, and that a day like this would come.

However, they also knew they were term-limited, and could avoid responsibility by stalling. So they used up our reserves and pushed the problem down the road. When President Obama gave the states stimulus money to invest in the future, Michigan’s lawmakers just threw it at the deficit.

That is not what they should have done. They should have raised the state income tax on people like me who are still working, perhaps from the present 4.35 percent to 5.5 percent or so. We would have barely noticed it, and today the state would be much better off. I still think they should do that, instead of much of what Governor Snyder is going to do instead.

But we’ve been told that “taxes are bad,” so often that we believe it. So our roads are crumbling and our schools are falling apart, and we’d evidently rather have that than raise taxes.

However, bills come due. Most of us will pay more taxes now of one kind or another, including those who can’t afford it. The budget ends tax credits for lower-income Michiganders, and taxes both private and public pensions. This governor evidently believes that government shouldn’t try to pick winners or do social engineering in the marketplace, so tax credits for things like battery development, the film industry and brownfield reclamation will end.

He’s also going to slash spending for schools and universities, gambling that this won’t destroy the next generation’s prospects for the future. The legislature will certainly quarrel with some of this, but I haven’t seen anyone offering an alternative.

You get what you pay for, but in the end, you do have to pay. We weren’t willing to pay for years, and now, we largely can’t.

That’s what got Michigan to this budget today.

Essay: Two Plus Two - 2.16.11

Governor Rick Snyder will formally unveil his projected budget tomorrow morning. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks we need to keep simple arithmetic in mind.

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Tomorrow, Governor Rick Snyder will present to the legislature his proposed budget for the next fiscal year. The state is currently running a deficit of close to two billion dollars.

The governor also wants to make changes to the business tax system that would further add to that deficit. Keep in mind that by law, a balanced budget has to be enacted by September 30th.

If it isn’t, state government will legally have to shut down. Nobody wants that to happen. But there is vast disagreement over how to balance the budget. And there is great worry over just what the governor is going to propose. So, I’ve got the solution.

The governor should sternly cut any and all programs … that don’t affect me personally. He should also raise taxes and fees on any services I don’t use. I don’t hunt, so sock it to the hunters. I don’t drink anything other than wine, so tax the heck out of hard liquor.

Oh, and wig shops. Raise the tax on wig shops, I don‘t need one. Does my tax formula sound selfish and absurd? I am only stating what everybody feels. Our philosophy is “don‘t tax you, don‘t tax me, tax that man I don’t know behind that tree.”

That sounds silly. But we are now hearing statements made by people who should know better that are almost as stupid. Yesterday, this happened in reaction to rumors that they might propose ending the total tax exemption on private pensions. John Nixon, the sturdy, solidly conservative budget director the governor imported from Utah, hinted that this might make sense.

Specifically, he indicated that he didn’t see why people who were pulling down six-figure private sector pensions shouldn’t pay their fair share. Well, you would have thought he was proposing making anyone over sixty-five into Soylent Green.

Within hours, I got a hysterical e-mail from a man in Charlotte who said he would leave the state if pensions were taxed.

If so, he will have a somewhat limited choice of new locales. The only other states that exempt most or all pension income from taxation are Alabama, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, newly elected Attorney General Bill Schuette blustered that we shouldn’t even dream about letting any prisoners out early. Milton Mack, the chief probate judge in Wayne County, has studied our prison system. He says we could save many millions if we returned to a system of just locking up those we are afraid of, rather than everybody we were mad at. We could do that by putting some non-violent prisoners in halfway houses; some on tethers and some on medication.

However, for some politicians, the fact that we now spend way more on prisons than we do on higher education is just fine, as long as they aren’t accused of being soft on crime.

And if that isn’t bad enough, one legislator said we shouldn’t even think about raising the income tax rate, because people who are unemployed can’t afford it. Well, people who aren’t working don’t have an income, and so don’t pay income tax.

Robert Heinlein, the late science fiction writer, was fond of saying “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” We might do well to remember that, when we see the governor’s budget tomorrow.

Essay: Valentine for Michigan - 2.14.11

It’s Valentine’s Day, and Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry is thinking about what kind of Valentines our state would like to have -- and what it is likely to get.

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Well, it’s Valentine’s Day, and Mother Nature has shown Michigan a little love, at least. The temperature this morning was about forty degrees warmer than just a few days ago.

That makes a considerable difference when you have a puppy who wants to go for a mile and a half walk every morning, regardless of the weather. Nevertheless, Michigan needs all the love it can get.

We’ve had a bruising year, and unfortunately, this is shaping up as a week when we’ll be shown a lot of tough love, with the accent on the word tough. The Obama Administration started that before dawn this morning, when the President’s budget began to leak out. He’s proposing to cut a key federal environmental program, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, by twenty-five percent.

This is a program that was designed to dredge old industrial waste out of the lake beds, upgrade and improve sewer systems, and perhaps most importantly, fight invasive species.

This is especially dismaying since the President himself is from our neighboring Great Lakes state of Illinois. But if this makes you worry about the lakes, and plan on looking to the GOP majority in the House of Representatives for relief, you might be best advised to forget it.

They want to cut the budget even more. All this makes me fear that the real winner of the midterm elections may turn out to have been the Asian carp, which, if it gets established in the Great Lakes, could effectively destroy the fishing industry.

We are bound to get another jolt three days from now, when Governor Rick Snyder unveils his first budget. For years, we seem to have operated as though the state’s official song was “Don’t worry, be happy.” Our lawmakers couldn’t decide whether to cut spending or raise taxes, so they did neither. Now the cupboard really is bare.

We’ve got a nearly two billion dollar deficit, and it doesn’t seem likely that the administration plans to seek any new revenue.

So don’t go looking for caviar or Godiva chocolates from Lansing. It’s going to be an austere kind of year.

Which, if it pays off in the long run, may be the best Valentine’s Day present of all. Last year, I made a speech to a large retiree group around Valentine‘s Day. Afterwards, some sweet elderly lady told me that if I wasn’t attached, I would be a really good catch. I don’t think so, I said.

My hair is gray, I am pushing sixty, and my muscle tone is not something that causes people to suggest iron man contests.

Sadly, she agreed. “True,” she said, “But you’ve got what every women in this state wants today.” What’s that? I asked.

“You’ve got a job,” she said. That, apparently, is sex appeal today, Michigan style. Well, what nobody disputes is that we need a lot more jobs. Some of us will get, or give, chocolate and flowers today, and that’s as it should be.

But it would be the best Valentine’s present of all if some of this week’s tough medicine pays off in the form of more jobs next year. That’s the kind of love our state really needs to see spread around.

Essay: The Agony of the Detroit Public Schools - 2.10.11

Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is asking the legislature to guarantee an earlier loan. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks there’s a bigger problem here.

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Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, came to Lansing yesterday to ask for something he has to know he’s probably never going to get.

He wants the legislature to give what amounts to a loan guarantee to the company that insured the schools’ last round of borrowing. If that firm, Assured Guaranty Municipal Corporation, doesn’t get that assurance, it may block the schools from borrowing more money? Why? Because it worries DPS will go bankrupt.

Which would leave Assured Guaranty holding the bag. And it’s a pretty unpleasant bag, The schools are hemorrhaging money and students. Bobb came in two years ago, full of confident promises to eliminate the deficit. But it has only gotten worse.

Assured Guaranty insured a loan for a little over a quarter of a billion dollars the schools borrowed in 2005. Now, the schools need more. They have a new deficit of $327 million dollars.

That’s more than half their entire general fund budget. To make ends meet, Bobb says he needs to borrow $219 million next month.

He wants the legislature to help him get it. But lawmakers were skeptical at best. Bobb, whose time as Emergency Financial Manager ends in June, assured them that the district has no plans to file for bankruptcy. But that, of course, is what the chairman of General Motors said, right up until the time they filed for bankruptcy.

Senator Bert Johnson told reporters he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of any one company being entitled to extra protection.

“I think you’ve got to question if it’s a prudent move,“ he said. Johnson added that the lawmakers were sure to demand, quote “some serious accountability.” Robert Bobb “has got to prove the merit of his proposal.” Senator Johnson, who said those words, is a Detroit Democrat. If he feels that way, just imagine what the reaction is likely to be from the outstate Republicans who run the legislature.

The sad fact is that despite his best efforts, Robert Bobb has failed in his efforts to turn the schools around. So far as I can tell, he did reduce corruption, close buildings and cut costs where he could.

But the disaster was too far advanced. The schools are continuing to lose thousands of students a year, which means a loss of millions of badly needed dollars from the state.

Detroit’s Public Schools continue to be hit with almost daily scandals. Today, one Detroit newspaper is exposing an illegal grade-changing scheme. The other paper is writing about a Detroit high school basketball coach who was arrested for allegedly selling heroin on the side.

America is a nation that became great in large part because of our tradition of public schools. But common sense has to conclude that this model just doesn’t work in Detroit anymore.

Nolan Finley, the Detroit News’s editorial page editor, has urged the governor to dismantle the district, to instead oversee a portfolio or schools run by independent contractors.

That may sound like libertarian theory. But increasingly, it seems like it might be worth a try. The schools themselves don’t matter, after all. The children do. Their future, and that of our state and society, depends entirely on their getting an education.

By any means necessary.

Essay: State of Desperation - 2.9.11

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry and Detroit News Editorial Page Editor Nolan Finley had a discussion this week on the state of our state -- and found themselves in surprising agreement.

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Earlier this week Wayne State University’s Alumni Association invited me and Nolan Finley, the editorial page editor of the Detroit News, to have a frank discussion with their members.

The theme was “Michigan at a Crossroads,” a look at the challenges facing our state today. I think some people expected a bitter debate. After all, Finley runs an opinion section which is profoundly conservative. My reputation is that of some sort of moderate liberal, though I prefer to think of myself as a common sense pragmatist with a bias towards things that work.

But people expected a verbal slugfest, they were disappointed. Oh, Nolan and I have our differences. I think a graduated income tax would be a good idea; he doesn’t, and I‘d be comfortable with a higher level of taxation, if the revenue were to be used for the right things, like education, roads and bridges.

Fifteen years ago, our views probably would have been far further apart. But now, Finley and I were virtually united in recognizing that the first thing we all must do is understand how big our predicament is. Michigan is engaged in a race to the bottom, in more categories than anyone would care to count. We’ve gone from being a relatively rich state to a poor one.

Still, we have to somehow get competitive for the jobs and growth industries of the future. And that’s hard to do when we have crumbling roads and bridges and crippling deficits.

That’s even harder to do when school systems are failing, and when cities fail to meet their obligations and slip into emergency financial manager status, the equivalent, in the political world, of bankruptcy and receivership. Treasurer Andy Dillon said recently that five communities soon won’t be able to pay their employees.

This may be only the tip of the iceberg, and speaking of icebergs, there are other monstrous ones ahead. We both agreed that one of the most uncovered stories in this state is the fact that state pension funds have a staggering $15.5 billion dollars in unfunded liabilities.

This happened, in part, because of profound irresponsibility on the part of both political parties, something made all the more possible by term limits. A politician who knows he won’t be around, has lots of incentive to push the problem down the road.

Having seen the damage term limits have done, Nolan and I would repeal them in a heartbeat. There’s another elephant in the room we took on that nobody wants to talk about: Detroit.

Mayor Dave Bing is an intelligent and honest man. Yet he, like Robert Bobb at the Detroit Public Schools, has an impossible task. Detroit is no longer viable as a city. Its tax base is too small; the vast majority of its remaining citizens are poorly educated -- most lack even a high school diploma -- and poor.

We agreed the best solution would be for the legislature to merge it with Wayne County -- or even better, make the tri-county area one megacity. Consolidated government has saved other cities.

We need it here. Our old way of life is disappearing forever.

Now, it‘s time to forget the old categories, and as Henry Ford spurred us to do a century ago, invent something new.

Essay: Pay Levels - 2.4.11

There’s been a lot of arguing this week over whether state workers are overpaid or underpaid. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks we need to put the discussion in perspective.

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Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people about compensation issues, or in plain English, if they were paid enough. These have included both public and private sector workers. They’ve included a seven dollar an hour Wal-Mart “associate” who thought she was being treated “okay,” to a hockey player so indignant at his low salary he could barely spit it out.

He was making half a million dollars a year. Two years before I interviewed him, he was playing for the Red Army team and subsisting mainly on VCRs he sold on the black market.

So it’s all a matter of perspective. I’ve also met a lot of people who thought they weren’t being paid enough, though they felt that most of their co-workers were overpaid.

Which brings us to today’s hot-button issue, which is, whether government workers are overpaid. The belief that they are has been a staple ingredient of political speeches since the New Deal.

This week the controversy flared again when Governor Rick Snyder released his Citizen’s Guide to Michigan’s Financial Health. In the main, it is a well-written primer that is really helpful in explaining how our state and its finances work.

But the booklet seems to go out of its way to bash government workers. In highlighted, easy-to-sound-bite pull quotes, it says things like “the average annual compensation of state employees is over twice the average annual compensation of private sector workers.”

What’s baffling is why our supposedly non-ideological new governor seemingly goes out of his way to whip up resentment against those who toil in the public sector.

Especially since it slyly notes in small type that, quote, “this analysis does not compare private and public sector employees with similar jobs, years of experience or education.” In other words, a state worker with a master’s degree in accounting does make more than a high school graduate driving a fork lift at Costco.

Predictably, the empire stuck back yesterday with a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, a generally progressive think tank that gets some of its funding from labor unions. It found that most state employees are actually paid below market levels.

But government workers do tend, by and large, to have better benefits. Well, both sides could continue the argument by churning up new statistics to prove their point.

What really matters is this: Is the state getting enough benefit from its workers to justify what they are being paid? Do we really want an underpaid and resentful work force handling the people’s business? Would cutting state workers’ pay make enough deficit difference to be worthwhile, considering what we might lose?

The common sense bottom line is that some people have traditionally taken government jobs, knowing they pay less than equivalent private sector jobs. They do that for a number of reasons, including more security, sometimes less stress, and better benefits.

I have no doubt that we could benefit from a non-partisan commission looking at the whole issue of public sector pay and performance. However, the governor needs to find a way to plug a two billion dollar hole in his budget, right away.

The clock is ticking, and fooling around with state employee compensation isn’t going to get him very far.