All Aboard the Disorient Express!
Just what can you say about our Governors State of the State address? It’s as if she lives in a parallel universe where reality never intrudes. A place where things are true because she wants them to be true. A place where she can talk about jobs in the planned movie studio to be built in Pontiac. Solar panel plants and the factory where the new car batteries are going to be assembled. All projects for the future which may or may not actually happen.
Michigan is in a billion dollar hole. Her solution is to eliminate the Department of History, Arts and Libraries. There, that ought to save a couple of thousand.
She also wants to stop subsidizing the Michigan State Fair. Fine. The State Fair’s been dying for years. There’s a few more thousand.
For some reason she clings to her dream of Michigan leading a huge, well paying, windmill and solar panel industry. After decades of development the entire US wind generation industry employs less then 6500 people. Solar employs less than 2000. Over 750,000 jobs have disappeared from Michigan since Jennifer became Governor. If the entire renewable energy industry doubled in size and located everything in Michigan we’re talking about a drop in the bucket when it comes to job creation. Besides, Toledo, Ohio is already up and running with the alternative energy business. We’d need to not only attract what jobs there are, we’d have to compete with a neighboring city and state that already makes the stuff.
She is right that the car battery assembly plant is going to be in Michigan. The batteries are going to be made in South Korea.
She has some good news for parents trying to put kids through college. She wants to freeze tuition for next fall. Good. The problem is that it costs $5131.00 a semester to put your kid into Michigan State. One year in a Michigan public university is equal to 34% of the average family’s income. Not raising the tuition payment 2% next fall is nice, but is that really going to make a college education affordable? I don’t think so. Oh, she’s going to make up the differences to the colleges with “stimulus money” from the Feds. So much for stimulating job growth.
The most surreal part of the speech is where she calls on electric utilities to “rethink” building coal fired power plants. She wants them to build alternative energy facilities. Huh? After years of permits, planning, financing, and construction contracts Consumers Energy is supposed to “rethink” their new plants and build what? Solar panels? We live in Michigan not Arizona! Hasn’t she noticed? Or did she mean windmills? How many windmills would it take to power Flint, Bay City or even Mt. Pleasant? Or a factory?
It takes two huge towers just to power Mackinaw City, Pop.859.
Her biggest dream is Michigan as Hollywood. We now have a ridiculously expensive tax incentive for movie makers. Michigan will refund up to 42% of the money the moviemaker spends in the state. If you film a movie here costing $100 million bucks the taxpayers of Michigan will give you $42 million back. You get to market the movie and if you make $300 you keep the profit. Not a bad deal for movie makers, is it? Not such a good deal for everyone else. I’ll bet if we offered to subsidize 42% of GMs costs while letting them keep the profit their stock wouldn’t be selling for $2.80 a share. So far it’s cost us $122 million to have Clint Eastwood and some other lesser lights make a pass through our state spreading glamour. We’re not Hollywood. They come here because we’re stupid enough to pay them to and we have unlimited slums in which to film crime movies.
There’s a disturbing lack of realism to this whole thing. It’s totally unconnected to life in Michigan in 2009. Michigan is the most “moved out of” state according to Mayflower Van Lines. Detroit is ranked the worst “move to” destination of any city in the country. Saginaw, Flint and Pontiac are dying as fast as Detroit. Ford is eighty cents away from no longer being listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and old faithful Dow lost 1.55 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2008. It expects worse in 2009. Education Week says that 75% of the kids that start the 9th grade in the Detroit school system will drop out. That system is over $400 million in the hole and is losing 10,000 students a year. The Detroit Police and Fire Retirement system and the Detroit General Retirement System have lost $2.5 Billion despite junkets around the world by political hacks on the pension boards.
This is reality. This is what must be dealt with now. Windmill and movie fantasies may be fun, but they aren’t real and they aren’t now. If she or her administration has even the remotest grasp of how serious things are for this state they have yet to demonstrate that knowledge.
