Minnesota and Wisconsin
Interesting New York Times column on the recent economic fortunes of Minnesota and Wisconsin. And the correlation between that and the policies pursued by their Governors the past three years: Minnesota’s progressive Mark Dayton and Wisconsin’s conservative Scott Walker. The column’s conclusion: “Which side of the experiment — the new right or modern progressivism — […]
Which top ten?
Insightful column by Chris Farrell for Bloomberg Businessweek entitled “Innovative States Aren’t Low-Tax States”. Worth reading! As we did in our last two posts, Farrell looks at the actual performance of the top and bottom states on the Tax Foundation’s 2014 State Business Tax Climate Index and adds the top and bottom on the conservative American […]
Lansing State Journal on our new report
The Lansing State Journal provides extensive coverage of our latest report in their Outlook section today. Worth checking out! Included are columns by me and Doug Stites, who just retired from his long-time position as CEO of Capital Area Michigan Works. And there is an editorial on what the findings in the report mean for the […]
The right top ten updated
As we explored in our last post being in the top ten in business cost rankings has little or nothing to do with Michigan families ability to pay the bills or save for their kids college or their retirement. (As in the last post this is an update of a post I did nearly a […]
The wrong top ten updated
Nearly a year ago I did what turned out to be one of my most popular posts which looked at how states ranked highly by the Tax Foundation did in terms of economic performance. Its time for an update. Then, as today, being highly ranked in business climate rankings seems increasingly to be the goal/measuring […]
New report lessons II
We have in our last few reports deconstructed per capita income into its components. Doing that has made clear the importance of wages and benefits paid by private sector employers to the future prosperity on the country. We measure that with private sector employment earnings per capita corrected for inflation. Our new report –– The […]
New report lessons
Interesting reaction to our new report. Nearly everyone wants to talk about what it means to policy. And yet for Don Grimes and I the important lessons in the report is about the economy, not policy. Policy should be about what levers get you to where you are trying to go. And what the report […]
San Francisco winning
Conventional wisdom is the places with the lowest costs (so-called business friendly) have the best economies. Think again! If that were true New York City–particularly Manhattan–and San Francisco should be collapsing. Instead they are surging. We explored Manhattan’s success in a previous post. Lets turn out attention to San Francisco, most likely the second most […]
Still addicted to tax cuts
In a previous post I explored the nearly two decade bipartisan addiction Michigan policy makers have to cutting taxes. The latest evidence of the continuation of the addiction is the near unanimous vote by both houses of the Michigan legislature to impose the sales tax on the difference between the sale price and trade in […]
Manufacturing a liability?
Michigan political leaders, on a bi-partisan basis, have made manufacturing the lynchpin of their plans for restoring Michigan to prosperity. No question manufacturing––high paid factory jobs––was the key ingredient to Michigan being one of the most prosperous places on the planet for most of the Twentieth Century. The question is “can it be the driver […]