Playing the Budget
Voodoo Alchemy Card
by John Lindstrom
Gongwer News Service
August 13, 2010
There are moments of clarity and realization. Sometimes they happen on the road to Damascus. Sometimes they happen when one is furiously engaged in work long past the time he should be in bed. It’s really rather magical when it happens.
At about 2 a.m. on [...]

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Smothering the Hope
of an Early Budget
by John Lindstrom
Gongwer News Service
May 28, 2010
Let us not talk falsely now, because the hour is getting late. So would Bono have sung at the U2 concert at Michigan State University on June 30 had not middle age caught up with him and found him having emergency back surgery?
But [...]

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Is Two-Year Spending Plan the Answer to Michigan’s Budget Woes?

Facts don’t support the rush to two-year state budgets

by Douglas C. Drake
April 16, 2010
From time to time — and this is one of those times — “reformers” call for the Michigan Legislature to change its budget process by [...]

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Conquering the 2010-11 Budget
by John Lindstrom
Gongwer News Service
April 9, 2010
Once more into the breach, once more into the teeth of the fray, up boys, arise virtuous maidens, cast off your drowsy ways — for your state has need of you again. Come gallant lads and lassies, take up the cudgel, draw back your bows of [...]

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Nothing Getting Done
by Jack Lessenberry
April 2, 2010
When it comes to responsible state government, Michigan may be on the road to disaster.
Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything. The lawmakers are all scrambling to keep their jobs or find other jobs, since this is an election year for virtually every position in state government.
The [...]

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Fireside Chat
by Jack Lessenberry
March 19, 2010
The poor, philosophers used to say, will always be with us. Michigan has two problems that have gotten worse, and seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon: the plight of the Detroit public schools, and the state’s enduring financial crisis.
Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager who now runs the schools, is [...]

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Trapped from Moving Forward
by John Lindstrom
Gongwer News Service
March 12, 2010
It is March, of course, but close enough to spring to quote T.S. Eliot, particularly when his lines have so much meaning: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”
These weeks have [...]

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Truth in Advertising
by Tim Skubick
February 26, 2010
When the Snyder for Guv guys were fact-checking their notorious Nerd commercial, they missed one huge error. The announcer claimed that business guy Snyder had a Ten-Point Plan that the typical career politician would not understand.
Turns out, every politician will understand. That’s because much of the Snyder blueprint contains [...]

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Summer Scenario

by Craig Ruff
February 16, 2010
The following events are fictional. Only the players are real.
The Detroit Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference opens on Wednesday, June 2. Downstate in Lansing, the Big Three (Granholm, Bishop, and Dillon) concede that they are solar years away from hatching a budget deal for 2010-11.
Fed-up business, civic, and association leaders gathered [...]

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Begging for Change
by Annie Scott
January 16, 2010
Here’s what’s going on in a land far away but not so far apart from the Mitten …
Here in sunny California, the forecast is bleak for state government. The budget is in an epic $20-billion hole. Public services have been slashed and burned. Ahnold is loudly demanding [...]

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