California growing, Kansas not so much
Paul Krugman has done recent New York Times columns on economic growth in California since the election of Governor Jerry Brown and in Kansas since the election of Governor Sam Brownback. The California column entitled “Left Coast Rising” is about the state’s impressive growth since the state raised taxes. In Kansas its the opposite story, […]
Trickle down and the Millennials continued
At its core, Thomas Sugrue’s critique of making retaining and attracting young professional a priority really should be aimed at regions and states, not cities. What Sugrue is arguing is that it is not an effective jobs and economic development strategy. City government has very little clout in either. In his Free Press interview Sugrue […]
Michigan Future Schools helps two new high school open in Detroit
Michigan Future Schools (MFS), an initiative of Michigan Future Inc., announced that two new Detroit high schools it has invested in are opening today, joining seven others previously launched with investments from MFS. The two new schools are: Detroit Delta Preparatory Academy for Social Justice Schools for the Future Detroit Detroit Detroit Delta Preparatory Academy […]
Trickle down and the Millennials
Thomas Sugrue is the author of the must-read “The Origins of the Urban Crisis”, a history of the deindustrialization of Detroit. He was a keynote speaker at the last Detroit Regional Chamber’s Detroit Policy Conference. Prior to the speech he did an interview with John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press which was entitled: “Sugrue: […]
High taxes and more and better jobs
By and large our Minnesota policy case study has been well received. The facts are clear. It has the best economy of the Great Lakes states by far. And it also is the highest tax and spending state, with the most generous safety net, in the Great Lakes. And this has been true for decades. […]
A generous safety net helping economic growth
In his last post about our State Policies Matters report, Rick Haglund wrote of the much more generous safety net Minnesota has compared to Michigan. I wrote on the topic in a post entitled “The safety net and employment”. Both of us have noted that Minnesota disproves the all too conventional wisdom that a generours safety […]
Upcoming posts
For the next several weeks these posts will be written by Rick Haglund. Rick authored our latest report: State Policies Matter: How Minnesota’s Tax, Spending and Social Policies Help it Achieve the Best Economy Among Great Lakes States. His posts will highlight the lessons he learned in his investigation of Minnesota’a approach to growing its economy. By […]
Tuition too high?
MLive reports that Governor Snyder in an Ann Arbor presentation complained about college tuition being too high. The article quotes the Governor: “Tuition has gone up a lot and there are two or three things that we need to do. One is: we need to keep working with the universities on managing their cost structures. We […]
Community colleges
The good folks at Bridge Magazine published a guest commentary I wrote based on my commencement address at Alma College. (The Bridge column is here and the entire Alma speech here. The article was republished, to my pleasant surprise, by the Detroit Free Press here.) Jim Jacobs, the terrific President of Macomb Community College, in […]
Two important books II
In my last post I recommended The Second Machine Age for anyone interested in learning what the economy and jobs of the future are likely to look like. The second book I want to recommend is about education. As followers of our work know we have come to believe that education is the best lever […]