Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Why Libraries Matter - 3.1.11

Libraries are trouble in many places; the Detroit Public Library announced massive layoffs last week. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wonders if our priorities are in the right place.

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Predicting the future can be a dangerous thing. When I was a child in the early nineteen-sixties, I used to watch a television show that predicted how we’d live in the far-off world of 2000.

By then, I was told, our homes would be heated by mini-nuclear power plants in the basement and we’d take our private helicopters to work. Nobody, however, saw the coming of the Internet.

Futurologists have gotten somewhat more cautious since then, but there is something most of them do agree on, which is that days are numbered for libraries as we have known them. Printed products have been moving rapidly to servers and Kindles. While most are still published on paper, this is widely seen as a temporary measure which will last only as long as it takes the old fuddy-duddies to die off.

And priorities are shifting. Last week, the Detroit Public Library announced the layoff of a fifth of their entire staff, or eighty-three employees, at the end of March. The far more affluent suburb of Troy has already voted to close its library. Other libraries across the state are threatened with huge cuts or extinction.

The economy is bad, but why do we feel that we can live without libraries? Here’s what one reader posted on the Detroit Free Press website, spelling several words wrong in the process: “Library’s are fast becoming a thing of the past due to rapid access and information that can be had via the Internet.”

Or, in other words, why would we possibly need a place where books are kept and stored when we’ve got Google? Those who defend libraries mainly do so on the grounds that everybody doesn‘t have a computer at home. The newspaper‘s story about the layoffs talked about all the poor people who come to the library to print resumes and scan the internet for job openings.

That is indeed more than enough reason to keep libraries open and well funded. That’s not, however, the main reason we need them. I think we need libraries because of books. That’s right, books. Printed books, books on paper, books on different topics lining the shelves.

To the extent I am a successful adult today, it is due in large part to that when I was a kid I spent hours and hours in public libraries; reading at random, satisfying my curiosity, learning that an interest in one thing leads to an expanded interest in other things.

Yes, you can find information on the internet. But usually you are finding just what you are looking for. You are far less likely to run into a book by accident that may change your life, as people do in libraries. They still do this, by the way; I talked to a twelve-year-old boy in line at the Rochester Hills library who was working through an adventure series.

There really isn’t any substitute for a personal experience spent with a portable book with pages you can feel, and which can start you on a friendship with somebody who may be long dead.

If we lose libraries, we may someday be a state of well-trained technocrats, maybe even prosperous ones. But we won’t be a truly civilized people any more, and that will be incredibly sad.

Essay: A Natural at the Game - 2.28.11

Both Governor Rick Snyder’s friends and enemies often refer to him as a “non-politician.” Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about that.

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Governor Rick Snyder is not a “politician.” He would tell you that himself. I first heard he wasn’t a politician from a bunch of political reporters more than a year ago, who felt he was wasting his money on what they felt was a catchy, but ultimately silly commercial.

This was, of course, the famous “tough nerd” commercial that first aired during last year’s Superbowl. Tim Skubick, the dean of, Lansing political reporters, thought it was likely to backfire.

This is a tough, blue-collar state, he said. Not a place where people voted for guys who called themselves “nerds.“

I didn’t know what to make of all this myself, till I saw Snyder skillfully and with scalpel-like precision, separate himself from the rest of the pack during the primary campaign. Like a veteran racehorse he ran third much of the way, then shot ahead in the final stretch, winning by nine lengths and a hundred thousand votes.

The general election wasn’t even a contest. But there was a lot of skepticism as to how the new governor would actually do with the hurly-burly of governing.

Jennifer Granholm had been a crashing failure, something she herself attributed to having never served in the legislature. But she had at least been attorney general, and one of many cogs in Wayne County boss Ed McNamara’s political machine.

Snyder was a venture capitalist and former computer executive without a day‘s worth of practical politics in his past. When he revealed during the campaign that he had no idea who was the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, some sneered.

But I felt otherwise. Being a political analyst is one of the few jobs for which age is an advantage. I remembered the scorn and disdain the experts felt when a washed-up movie actor ran for governor of California. Turned out he did a pretty fair job.

Republicans in places like Michigan, however, felt that their party would be committing suicide if they ever nominated him for president. “He’d be another Goldwater,” one told me in the late 1970s. Too right-wing, too extreme, too generally ignorant of the world. When the man did run, I myself asked him a question that revealed he had no idea on which side of Pakistan Afghanistan was located.

Yet he won forty-four states the first time he ran, and all but one the next. The man people feared might start World War III wound up ending the Cold War. I’ve been talking about Ronald Reagan, of course, and today, some people talk about adding him to Mount Rushmore.

Now I am well aware Governor Snyder has yet to even get his first budget through the legislature, or prove he can compromise if need be. But this non-politician got a President of another party to agree to count Canadian dollars as our matching highway funds.

And this governor has wisely avoided plunging this state into turmoil by starting an ideological war, as his counterpart in Wisconsin has in trying to abolish collective bargaining.

We’ve got a way to go before we know how successful a governor Rick Snyder will be. But up to now, he’s defied the experts -- and for a non-politician, has had one heck of a non-political year.

Essay: General Motors Wins a Star - 2.25.11

General Motors posted its first yearly profit last year since 2004. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what that means.

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Two years ago, when President Obama decided to spend billions to prop up General Motors, and then to guide it through a cushioned, “soft landing” bankruptcy, there were a lot of doubters. Many thought nature should have been allowed to take its course, and that the once-mighty General should have been allowed to die.

At the time, a commentator on NBC News said “As the GM bailout goes, so goes the Obama presidency.”

But you won’t find Republicans saying that today. General Motors has come roaring back in a way that’s astonished virtually everyone in the industry, not to mention those who talk for a living.

Yesterday, we learned for the first time since 2004, GM ended last year with a profit -- four point seven billion dollars. That was also its biggest profit since the go-go year of 1999.

What‘s more, there are cautious expectations that GM will do even better this year, as the nationwide automotive market continues to recover. One strike against the General is that it still doesn‘t have a lot of exciting new product, as they call new cars in the auto business. They do have two new small vehicles which are adequate if not exciting, the Buick Verano and Chevrolet Sonic.

And the much-ballyhooed, plug-in, mostly electric Chevy Volt is only now emerging from the shadows and getting into showrooms across the nation. Spokesmen for the automaker say there are other exciting new products, choices and technologies in the pipeline, and that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

All this is good news. Had General Motors been allowed to go out of existence, the ripple effect could have resulted in a loss of a million or more jobs nationwide. Yesterday, GM was even able to announce that the company had resumed giving grants to the arts, through not on the same scale as in the pre-bankruptcy days.

Yet there’s a ghost nagging in my ear.

The ghost of auto writer Jerry Flint, who covered this company for more than half a century. Flint died last year, but when GM was on the rocks a few years ago he told me something I’ll never forget.

The worst thing that could happen to GM, he said, would be for the struggling automaker to have a sudden unexpected success as it struggled to remake itself. That, he told me, could bring back all the old arrogance that got GM into so much trouble.

I think that’s not as likely to happen now, certainly not for a while. CEO Dan Akerson is a telecommunications guy by training, not a product of the insular and incestuous GM culture.

Yesterday, he spoke as if he was pleased with his company’s new concentration on small cars, vehicles traditionally disdained by auto executives who were hot to reap the big profits that came from selling giant gas guzzling SUVs. I think Akerson knows that one profitable year does not an industry turnaround make.

And we should know that however nice it is to have the General back in the black, it will never again employ hundreds of thousands of us at high wages, nor will it lead us to a new, bright future. That will be up to a lot of captains and lieutenants. Up to, that is, all of us.

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: Grappling With The Budget - 2.15.11

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been looking at President Obama’s proposed federal budget and thinking about how it affects Michigan. The answer is more than you’d think.

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I was looking at President Obama’s proposed next year’s budget yesterday, trying to get some clues for how all this would affect Michigan. Suddenly, I was hit by a sudden revelation.

Nobody really understands this budget, I thought. Nobody understands this budget because nobody really can understand it. It I too big, too vast, has too many contours and moving parts.

Oh, I’m not just trying to cover up my own ignorance. I have been looking at government budgets for a long time. I could make what sounds like intelligent conversation about the federal budget, and write stories analyzing and explaining it. Indeed, I used to do that for newspapers in the 1980s. But how can anyone really understand a document that documents the proposed spending of three point seven trillion dollars? A trillion, by the way, is a thousand billion, or a thousand thousand million dollars. Which is more than the mind can grasp.

Forty years ago, when I was taking freshman economics, America’s entire gross national product was less than a trillion dollars. Inflation has more than quintupled any figures, but government spending has more than kept pace.

When you looking at the size of these numbers and the size of the deficit, it is easy to scream that we need to make massive cuts in federal spending. But when you study how deeply federal spending is interwoven into our lives, it is hard to see how to do that.

Yes, you can nibble at the margins. President Obama would cut two-third of the funding for Community Development Block Grants, which will mean some troubled neighborhoods in Flint and Detroit may not get the assistance they were counting on. There will be less money for cleaning up the Great Lakes, but more than $13 million dollars to build a new barrier to try and keep out the Asian carp. Michigan will lose some jobs because the President is giving up on making something called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle for the Marine Corps.

The Marines don’t really want it, and it doesn’t seem to work very well. The President, as others before him, is attempting to use the budget as a tool of economic engineering. He’s given up on hydrogen technology as a fuel of the future, something General Motors has also done.

Hydrogen funding is being eliminated, something legendary Michigan inventor Stan Ovshinsky says is a mistake. Instead, the President’s budget is dramatically increasing funding for electric vehicles, including infrastructure like charging stations.

There will be cuts to Pell grants for poor students and an attempt to get the richest Americans and corporations to pay more.

Naturally, all the President’s proposals will be modified by Congress, after much kicking and screaming. This will also be affected by other things that happen over the year.

But what a detailed look at this budget gives you is a sense of how deeply federal spending is part of everything in Michigan.

And everywhere else. Keynesians used to say that we didn’t need to worry much about federal deficit spending, because we really just owed it to ourselves. Now, however, we owe much of it to future generations, and an ever-increasing amount to the Chinese. You have to wonder what will happen when payment, at long last, comes due.