The UAW is more and more becoming a political organization rather than one that is focused on representing the collective bargaining rights of its members, Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey told The Detroit News recently after UAW President Bob King called on members to engage in civil disobedience and re-elect President Barack Obama and Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

“The UAW is doubling-down on hard left-wing politics,” Kersey said. “It’s about politics. It’s not about the workplace anymore.”

Kersey’s 2008 study, “Union Spending in Michigan,” found that unions generally only spend about one-third of the money they receive from members in the form of dues on actually representing those members.

“The average autoworker is not an advocate of class warfare on this level,” Kersey added. “That is why Michigan needs right-to-work.”

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said that the state should become a national leader in its tax policies. The 2011 business tax reforms get the state close to that goal, according to the Tax Foundation’s state business tax climate index. Here is their summary of how Michigan’s corporate tax changes improved the state’s business tax climate ranking.

MichiganVotes.org sends a weekly report to newspapers and TV stations around the state showing how state legislators in their service area voted on the most important or interesting bills of the past week.

Y = Yes, N = No, X = Not Voting

House Bill 5075, Court consolidation package: Passed 34 to 4 in the Senate
To consolidate and reduce the number of judges in Michigan courts, as recommended by the State Court Administrative Office. This is one of several dozen bills reducing the number of Michigan judges in particular district, circuit and probate courts. Of little import to regular citizens, this is a matter of intense interest to county political establishments, which for more than a decade have succeeded in obstructing the reform despite widespread recognition the state has too many judgeships (and the costs associated with them). The bills are passing now with unanimous or near-unanimous votes.

Who Voted "Yes and Who Voted "No"

House Bill 5125, Allow elimination of road commissions: Passed 63 to 41 in the House
To establish that a county road commission can be eliminated by a county board if the road commission's members are appointed, and eliminated by a vote of the people if they are elected. If either happens, the county board would assume the duty of managing the county's road system. Reportedly, Democratic opposition was (mostly) reversed when the Republican House Speaker made a deal to increase spending on government "early child education" programs by $12.5 million. 

House Bill 5142, Expand “corridor improvement” borrow/spend/tax authorities: Passed 100 to 6 in the House
To expand a 2005 law authorizing local “corridor improvement authorities” that can borrow for various government spending projects (generally but not necessarily related to mass transit), and then repay the loans with money levied in "special assessments" (property taxes), or with tax revenue "captured" from other local government taxing units by means of “tax increment financing" schemes. The bill would authorize multi-government versions of these authorities.

Who Voted "Yes and Who Voted "No"

SOURCE: MichiganVotes.org, a free, non-partisan website created by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, providing concise, non-partisan, plain-English descriptions of every bill and vote in the Michigan House and Senate. Please visit http://www.MichiganVotes.org.

That’s the verdict of British writer James Delingpole, in a blog posted in the Daily Telegraph, about an article by Kevin Myers published in the Irish Independent online version, brought to our attention by a Paul Chesser Facebook post. (Got all that? Ain’t the Internet grand?)

Myers’ focus is on the potentially fatal results of European wind energy, should this form of green delusion be carried to its logical extreme, and the pure destruction of wealth its massive misallocation of resources already represents (imagine hundreds of Solyndras). Thanks to members of the Michigan House and Senate, since 2008 the same dangerous and destructive folly is underway in the Great Lake State. That’s when they enacted a law imposing a 10 percent “renewable” energy mandate on electric utilities, and forcing customers to pay for it through higher electricity bills.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from “Energy policy based on renewables will win hearts but won't protect their owners from frostbite and death due to exposure”:

Russia's main gas company, Gazprom, was unable to meet demand last weekend as blizzards swept across Europe, and over three hundred people died. Did anyone even think of deploying our wind turbines to make good the energy shortfall from Russia?

Of course not. We all know that windmills are a self-indulgent and sanctimonious luxury whose purpose is to make us feel good. Had Europe genuinely depended on green energy on Friday, by Sunday thousands would be dead from frostbite and exposure, and the EU would have suffered an economic body blow to match that of Japan's tsunami a year ago. No electricity means no water, no trams, no trains, no airports, no traffic lights, no phone systems, no sewerage, no factories, no service stations, no office lifts, no central heating and even no hospitals, once their generators run out of fuel.

Modern cities are incredibly fragile organisms, which tremble on the edge of disaster the entire time. During a severe blizzard, it is electricity alone that prevents a midwinter urban holocaust. We saw what adverse weather can do, when 15,000 people died in the heat wave that hit France in August 2003. But those deaths were spread over a month. Last weekend's weather, without energy, could have caused many tens of thousands of deaths over a couple of days.

Why does the entire green spectrum, which now incorporates most conventional parties across Europe, deny the most obvious of truths? To play lethal games with our energy systems in order to honour the whimsical god of climate change is as intelligent and scientific as the Aztec sacrifice of their young. Actually, it is far more frivolous, because at least the Aztecs knew how many people they were sacrificing: no one has the least idea of the loss of life that might result from the EU embracing "green" energy policies.

Corporate welfare, business subsidies and other handouts will increase $20 million, to $195 million, in Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed 2013 budget, according to MLive.com, causing concern for one Mackinac Center analyst.

“I hope that the governor doesn’t scale these programs up year after year as we’ve seen happen in the past two administrations,” Michael LaFaive, director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, told MLive.com.

Funding for movie subsidies and the Pure Michigan tourism campaign that benefits an industry which refuses to help fund the service will remain at $25 million each, MLive.com reported.

An Op-Ed about health insurance costs for public school districts written by two Mackinac Center analysts appeared Wednesday in Macomb County’s Advisor & Source.

Written by Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek and Education Policy Analyst Kyle Jackson, the piece details how districts over time have shortchanged classroom spending as employee health benefits have taken up larger and larger chunks of money.

Here is one example, however, of how schools can save money when employees pay a fair share of their own health insurance premiums.

Senior Legislative Analyst Jack McHugh was a guest this morning on "The Tony Conley Show" on WILS AM1320 in Lansing, where he discussed a legislative pack of bills that could force motorists in Michigan to pay the highest gas taxes in the nation.

In a new commercial for U.S. Senate candidate and former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, an actress portraying a youngish Chinese woman rides her bike up to the camera and thanks "Debbie Spend-It-Now" for putting America deeply into debt. The actress’s less-than-perfect syntax has drawn fire for playing on stereotypes. But the real problem is the half-baked economics that the ad promotes.

There's a saying in the financial world: "If you owe the bank $10,000 and you can't pay, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 and can't pay, the bank has a problem." On the surface, being a creditor might seem like the stronger position and it often is, but only up to a point. If the debtor, be it an individual, company or country, is in any risk of defaulting, the creditor stands to lose everything they loaned. At this point the federal debt situation is dire enough that it could drag down both countries eventually.

China doesn't get rich by holding American debt. China makes money only if we find a way to make good on our bonds. And the most likely way for that to happen is for the American economy to grow while government spending is reined in.

There are other issues where American and Chinese interests might come into conflict, but on this one the Chinese only do well if we do well first. By all means, criticize Sen. Debbie Stabenow's spending, but leave the Chinese out of this one. They aren't the source of our debt problem. Washington is.

Rep. Ray Franz, R-Onekama

The “R” or “D” after a politician’s name often does little to help voters understand the governing philosophy of their elected representative. The way many of their bills read, one might just as well replace those letters with a generic “S” for Statist or “PC” for Political Careerist.

Occasionally, however, a legislator does the right thing and deserves recognition. Based on a new bill to strike a blow against overly intrusive big government on behalf of the home repair tradesmen and entrepreneurs, Rep. Ray Franz, R-Onekama, is one of them.

Here’s how MichiganVotes.org described the legislation Rep. Franz introduced last week:

2012 House Bill 5326: Exempt residential repair trades from state licensure mandates

Introduced by Rep. Ray Franz (R) on Jan. 31, 2012, to exempt individuals and contractors who do home and commercial structure rehabbing, and those in certain building trades, from licensure mandates currently imposed by the state (or ones that have been proposed). Homebuilders would still be subject to licensure, but those who make a living doing home and commercial structure carpentry, concrete work, swimming pool installation, basement waterproofing, excavation, insulation, masonry, painting and decorating, roofing, siding and gutters, screen or storm sash installation, tile and marble work, garage building and house wrecking would be specifically exempted. Individuals who buy, rehab and sell "fixer-uppers" for a profit also would be exempt.

This isn’t the first time Rep. Franz has attracted the attention of free-market defenders and Tea Party types. In one of the first votes taken by the newly seated House last year, he was one of just seven out of 63 Republicans to oppose $10 million worth of tourism marketing subsidies in the form of taxpayer-funded “Pure Michigan” ads. This took place just two months after an election in which all those Republicans swore on stacks of Constitutions that they “got” the “no more giveaways” Tea Party message, and shared the movement’s values.

This vote was especially courageous for Rep. Franz, who represents four lakefront counties along Lake Michigan where tourism is important: Leelanau, Benzie, Manistee and Mason. Perhaps the letters after Rep. Ray Franz’s name should be “P” for principled and “MWHS” for “means what he says.”

Kudos also to Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mount Pleasant, the only lawmaker to co-sponsor Rep. Franz’s licensure repeal bill. The bill is almost surely DOA, because the licensure mandates serve the interests of established businesses by helping them keep potential competitors on the sidelines.

Excessive licensure is just one of the many regulatory excesses that have crippled our (formerly) dynamic economy to a point where economic sclerosis now endangers future prosperity.

The economic evidence for the value of right-to-work laws, which allows individual workers to choose whether or not to join or otherwise support a union, continues to build. Last week the Cascade Policy Institute issued a report indicating that Oregon would have 233,000 additional jobs and wage income would be 13 percent higher if it had passed a right-to-work law in 1985, at about the time neighboring Idaho took that step.

The paper, assembled by Ph.D. economists Eric Fruits and Randall Pozdena, compared the economic performances of right-to-work and non-right-to-work states. Fruits and Pozdena found that right-to-work states enjoyed a "robust" and positive effect on employment, personal income, and wages.

Fruits and Pozdena reached their conclusion after performing a regression analysis that accounted for a wide range of factors, such as the national business environment, population density, taxes and education.

Mackinac Center analysts have long advocated a right-to-work law for Michigan based on our own straight-up comparisons of right-to-work and non-right-to-work states. With Indiana passing its own law, Michiganders will soon get to see the value of labor freedom up close. 

Public school special interests groups uniformly lobby for the state to give more money to school districts. To sell this idea to policymakers and taxpayers, these groups often claim that schools need "adequate," "stable," and "equal" funding. These talking points give rise to some common myths about school funding in Michigan.

The short video below examines one of these myths: The Unequal Funding Myth.

Michael LaFaive, director of the Center’s Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative, was quoted in an Alpena News editorial over the weekend about the impact on Michigan now that Indiana has extended right-to-work protections to its workers.

“I worry that without a right-to-work law of our own, Indiana will grow at Michigan’s expense,” LaFaive said.

Indiana already outpaces Michigan in a number of areas, which can be seen in commentaries by Mackinac Center experts here, here and here.

Nick Dranias at the Goldwater Institute has run the numbers on the costs and consequences of the decision a few decades ago to give state, school and local government employee unions the power to force public bodies to engage in collective bargaining. It’s not pretty. Here’s an excerpt:

From 1958 through 1968, illegal work stoppages or strikes at all levels of government increased 1,593 percent, resulting in a 33,790 percent increase in the loss of workdays. In 1967, New York City sanitation workers struck and buried city streets under 10,000 tons of garbage per day. In 1978, striking firefighters in Indiana refused to respond to a fire that burned through a downtown city block. “Blue flues” have repeatedly struck law enforcement officers in California since 1985, when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that public safety employees had the right to strike. And in December 2005, New York transit workers went on strike, costing the city $400 million per day in lost business and revenue.

The strike threat entailed by unionization combined with the power to force government employers to bargain over wages and benefits has empowered the average government worker to demand and receive hourly pay and benefits that are now 44 percent higher than the average private-sector worker’s. Those high costs are bankrupting state and local governments — and taxpayers — across the nation.

But it does not have to be this way.

More than 30 years ago, Virginia banned government-sector unions from collective bargaining and entering into collectively bargained contracts. Within seven years, government employees had abandoned their unions in droves as they realized the union did little for them.

Statistical analysis shows that if states prohibited all forms of collective bargaining, they could reap a total of nearly $50 billion in savings for state and local taxpayers across the country.

Read the rest here.

To Dranias’ list we can add these examples from Michigan: Illegal teacher strikes in Detroit in 1999 and 2008; and as reported in CapCon just this morning, state employee compensation costs that have increased on average from $78,999 in 2001 to $94,888 in 2011 when adjusted for inflation.  

Patrick Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, was a guest on “The Vic McCarty Show” Thursday on WMKT AM1270 in Traverse City. Wright discussed the plight of a group of graduate student research assistants at the University of Michigan whose rights to due process have been denied by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, which ruled that students opposed to being unionized could not present their side during hearings on the matter.

Portage Public Schools had an odd reaction to some good financial news this week, telling a company that could save it $270,000 a year "no thanks." That offer came from Grand Rapids Building Services, a facilities cleaning contractor that proposed taking over the school district’s first shift custodial duties.

GRBS is able to accomplish the same work at a lower cost primarily because it uses a different benefits package than Portage schools, one that doesn’t include overpriced health insurance from the Michigan Education Special Services Association or expensive contributions to the unsustainable school employee pension plan. GRBS’ more reasonable benefits packages mean it can provide the same service to the district for about $20,000 less per custodian, according to The Kalamazoo Gazette.

Portage’s refusal of GRBS’s offer is especially odd because it already contracts with the company to provide its second- and third-shift custodians, and has since 2009. In fact, the board appears content with that service as the proposal came at the same meeting where they renewed their contract for those second- and third-shift custodial services.

The reason the school board is turning down the offer appears to be one completely unrelated to fiscal prudence or concern for quality services. School Board President Bo Snyder told The Gazette the district walked away from the $270,000 savings because “prior boards have elected not to use the outsource model for the first-shift custodians in the buildings.”

In other words, the current board won’t make a sound financial decision because previous boards didn’t make a sound financial decision.

That kind of financial strategy is one reason why school districts always feel like they’re in a budget crunch, despite the fact per-pupil spending has risen steadily over the last 40 years. Districts like Portage need to remember their primary goal is not to perpetuate the status quo; they should be more focused on funding learning than funding insurance companies.

A Saginaw News article posted this afternoon asks in its story headline, “Is Fabiano Bros. a Monopoly?” The story covers a verifiable assertion I laid out in a commentary titled “Eight Ideas for Reforming Alcohol Control in Michigan.”

Unfortunately, the article is comprised largely of a collection of redirections on the part of the Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers Association, the Lansing-based trade group that represents state wholesalers. Fabiano Bros. is a beer and wine wholesaler headquartered in mid-Michigan.

First, and with respect to the reporter, she omits useful explanatory language. The full paragraph from my commentary reads:

Eliminate the beer and wine distributor monopoly on territory. Strip from the Michigan Liquor Control Code the requirement that suppliers of beer and wine grant exclusive sales territories to a select group of wholesalers [Emphasis added.] This mandate prevents competition, shackles suppliers and raises costs for consumers.

Then she writes that Michael Lashbrook, president of the Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers Association thinks the Mackinac Center is “off-base calling any distributor in the state a monopoly.”

As is plain from the text, we did not claim that any distributor was itself a monopoly. We argued that state law mandates that suppliers grant exclusive (the very definition of a monopoly) sales territories to wholesalers (plural). These are different concepts, though it is easy to forgive the reporter for any confusion.

What is troubling, however, is that Lashbrook was allowed to respond unchallenged with a redirection about manufacturers, not wholesalers:

We always tell people who question if there is a monopoly to go to a major grocery store and walk down the cereal or laundry detergent aisle and see how many manufacturers are represented on the shelves," Lashbrook said. "You'll see those product lines dominated by just a few manufacturers but if you go down the beer aisle or the wine aisle, you will see dozens, if not hundreds of manufacturers represented and that's true competition.

It’s true that there are numerous products in the average beer aisle, but that has nothing to do with the fact that the beer makers were required by an outdated state law to have their product distributed by one particular supplier in a particular territory, a practice that drastically limits competition and probably drives up costs to consumers.

Lashbrook also claims that these protectionist laws give “stability” to wholesalers and allow companies like Fabiano Bros. to grow and add employment. But this only tells one side of the story. That stability comes at the expense of consumers and other businesses who pay more for every drop of alcohol purchased than they would in a competitive marketplace. It also discounts the impact of others who would like to get in the distribution business but can’t because the supply is largely buttoned up.

Lastly, Lashbrook makes the odd charge that "the Mackinac Center believes you should treat it (alcohol) like a box of corn flakes." This claim is simply not true as a simple review of our published work would clearly indicate. Visit www.mackinac.org/1933 to see for yourself.

The Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers are arguably the greatest beneficiaries of an archaic liquor control code. It reads as if it were written for these lucky few members of a hereditary and elite millionaire’s club.

State-mandated territorial monopolies on the sale of beer and wine are worse than inefficient. They are an abuse of power over consumers of every stripe. This commercial cronyism — the cozy relationship between business and Lansing government — must end and soon.

An Op-Ed in the Orange County Register about public-sector pension reform in California cites a recent Mackinac Center study that found switching state employees hired after 1997 from a defined-benefit retirement system to a defined-contribution system has saved Michigan taxpayers as much as $4 billion in unfunded liabilities.

Just prior to noon Wednesday, the Indiana Senate passed House Bill 1001 on a 28-22 vote. Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the enrolled bill a few hours later. While the law does not change contracts currently in force, workers in Indiana will no longer have to pay union dues or agency fees as a term of employment when new union contracts are signed.

If the past is any guide, the law should be a boon to Indiana's economy and a tremendous benefit to Indiana's workers. Right-to-work laws are associated with faster economic growth, job creation and rising wages.

The law empowers workers and makes unions more accountable to the members they represent. We have every reason to believe that the working men and women of Indiana will use their new prerogatives wisely, that unions will adapt and survive, and that the great majority of Hoosiers will benefit.

We are confident that as Michiganders see what right-to-work protections bring to Indiana, support for labor freedom will expand here. Michigan may become the 24th right-to-work state, perhaps as early as the end of this year.

If there is a challenge in defending the right-to-work concept, it isn't researching or writing, it's boredom. Union officials continue to tell the same stories. After a while the material you have to read through and rebut gets repetitive.

For instance, here's retired AFL-CIO Program Manager John Kreucher in the The Jackson Citizen Patriot:

By undermining workers’ rights, this unfair scheme would give even more profits to greedy CEOs at the expense of our jobs, our retirement security and our kids’ future.

A recent study by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that workers in right-to-work states have a lower standard of living, make an average of $1,500 less per year and go without health insurance more frequently...A better name for this legislation would be “right to work for less.”

Greedy CEOs, hapless workers, yadda-yadda-yadda. And "right to work for less" —  real original.

OK, as far as the loss of wages goes, here's the data from Oklahoma:

(Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis)

See that big drop in wages starting in 2001 when Oklahoma enacted a right-to-work law? Yeah, neither do I. Such is the terror that awaits Michigan workers when they are no longer forced to pay union dues and agencies fees in order to keep a job — steadily rising wages. Oh the humanity!

If there's one thing that Michigan has to fear from a right-to-work campaign, it's boredom due to a union establishment that cannot come up with a real threat or even an original epithet, but can be counted on to repeat the same old rhetoric, over and over and over...

Jan. 29 through Feb. 5 is Catholic Schools Week 2012. To mark the occasion, you may like to read this 2005 commentary by Andrew J. Coulson, “Catholic Schools and the Common Good.”