Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

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.

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: 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.