Now is the time to expand Michigan's EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). Michigan's low-wage workers need help paying the bills now. Michigan employers having trouble finding enough workers to operate and expand their enterprises also need help now. Immediate expansion…
This post reruns a 2017 post by our former colleague Pat Cooney entitled the Problem with 3rd grade reading mandates. In it Pat lays out the evidence that 3rd grade reading mandates don't work and offers an alternative that does…
In 1979 General Motors employed 468,000 American hourly workers. 76 percent of their U.S. workforce. In 2021 General Motors employed 45,000 American hourly workers. 46 percent of their U.S. workforce. Today 24,000 work at the General Motors Global Technical Center…
For decades many business, political and media elites have told us that Florida is the model for improving student achievement. They constantly urge Michigan to replicate former Governor Jeb Bush's 1999 A+ Plan. Today, once again, Florida is being trumpeted…
In our last post we detailed that states with employment most concentrated in production––front-line factory––jobs are all structurally low-prosperity states, with per capita income substantially below the nation's. Those states include Michigan and Tennessee, both with per capita income twelve…
In 2004 Don Grimes and I wrote A New Path to Prosperity?. The report detailed that prosperous states were no longer manufacturing-based states, but were now those over concentrated in knowledge-based industries. In an accompanying Detroit News op ed, subtitled…
Increasingly our public conversation is dominated by claims that workers can do just as well without a four-year degree as with one. As we have explored frequently, pre pandemic––in both good and bad economic times––that simply was not accurate. Those…
The first post I wrote for this blog was 13 years ago. It was entitled the Need For a New Michigan and made the case that what made us prosperous in the past, won't in the future. That if we…
In June Minnesota recorded the lowest state unemployment rate ever. An astonishingly low 1.8 percent. In July Minnesota's unemployment rate remained at a best in the nation, record low 1.8 percent. (Ever in the case of state's unemployment rates means…
As Rick Haglund chronicled for Crain's Detroit Business, since General Motors in 1992 chose Arlington Texas over Willow Run for a motor vehicle assembly plant, Michigan’s economic development priority has been to compete for auto assembly and auto parts plants.…