Policy Pros: How Michigan Spends Your Tax Dollars

Hi, I'm Doug DeVos. I'm the chair of the communications committee for the West Michigan Policy Forum and I'm here with Jace Bolger, our policy expert and former speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives. Jace, we've been going through a lot of things about the state of Michigan and how we want more people to be in our state and to grow the tax revenue and have the tax base be bigger, but then people spend it. Who makes those decisions? Where does that money go and as a policy forum, how do we stay connected to that to try to make recommendations of what they should do or what maybe they shouldn't do? It's the people that we elect. So we make the choice ultimately by the people we send to office and then we're talking about the state budget. So state legislators ultimately decide, a governor will propose, but the legislature decides how that money will be spent and in many cases we the people might ask for something that, there's an old saying that one person's bacon is another person's pork and so when somebody will say, hey bring this special project back to me, another community might rightly see that as pork and so of course there's a ton of what we would all agree are key essential government services, you know, police, prisons, higher education, K-12 education, roads and infrastructure, water, sewer, there are a lot of things that get paid for out of that, but then there are a lot of optional things that those elected officials that we send to office, that we send to Lansing, choose to spend. You know at the policy forum we like Michigan, we like all of Michigan, we like every business, we like every citizen and we want to make sure that when we're spending tax dollars that we're thinking about everybody, not just somebody's unique need that might get over indexed because sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease right and sometimes it's just a lot of yelling and screaming that gets the attention of a politician and then somebody trades it for another deal in another town and I'm going to trade, okay I'll give you yours, you give me mine because I got to get re-elected. It gets into a really bad sequence there doesn't it? You know that can happen with whether it's special projects or whether it happens in incentives or sometimes it happens in things that we would agree are essential. There's a lot of money, additional dollars that have been put into the K-12 education system but we've not seen better performance for our kids so there's a multitude of areas where we ought to be stopping and asking is spending this money ultimately effective? This is somebody worked hard to make every dollar that state government has and they need to treat it as such instead of this is money we get to spend and look for places to spend it. You know we've talked a lot we focus on policy so whether you're on any side of the political spectrum you want your government to at least be competent and from the policies that we advocate we want people to think about those sorts of things and understand that taxpayer dollars are hard-earned that they just don't you know come out of nothing. They come out of an economy and they come out of someone's hard work at the end of the day. You mentioned something about business incentives and so we come at this from a from a primarily an economic sort of perspective and so we want economic opportunities to grow but there's a good way to do it and sometimes in our state our history we've had a bad way to do it. Well you know sometimes economic developers will talk about gardening versus hunting or transplanting and so gardening would be have an environment have all the things happening in a community or in a state that businesses will naturally grow in and then there's hunting or transplanting where you go to another place and try to attract them and bring them back. Well if the policies you put in place have effectively been round up all over the garden and the soil is that base is no longer healthy it doesn't matter how much you spend to go try to bring somebody back they're not going to grow and thrive there and so as we look at the West Michigan Policy Forum we're trying to make sure that the soil is great for all so that everybody has an opportunity to grow here and we're not going to try to get caught putting a bunch of money into a project that's not going to work and try to force it to come back. And that's always the temptation because those are really cool in the press right that's you get a lot of pressure a lot of visibility and you can make a lot of claims about what's going to happen but it's the hunting thing and it's like putting a pork chop around your neck so the dog will play with you right you know I mean so at some point it just doesn't make any sense but yet it's so attractive and when there's money there it's such an interesting thing to cut a ribbon and go in front and I appreciate the gardening thing and the role of government in creating that garden and the role of our elected officials in creating that garden and cutting the ribbon is important but like anything it just starts to go too far and at the policy forum we want to keep asking the questions about what's the right level. Well and I think when they work best it's their tie breakers there's a business is looking for where to expand and they found a couple of good places they think will succeed and they may have they make a make a final decision based on an incentive but far too often what states try to do is make incentives everything it would be akin to if you're out shopping for pick your something new whether it's a a phone or a car or a tv what do you want you want to be sure it works first and foremost you're going to read reviews to make sure that this is reliable if I'm spending money on it it's going to give me what I want you're not just going to look who has the best incentive because you know that that you could end up buying junk that way. You know one of the things that's great at the policy forum as we look at the state we know we're not the smartest people in the in this state right we have lots of other states we can look at you know and we've done a lot of that sort of thing and I think it's important for us to say okay where are the states that are best performing where is the attractiveness happening where is the vitality where are the populations going where is the wise spending of tax resources for you know any government service essential services or or or even creating an environment for economic growth and I think that's really important for us to understand we're we're not in a vacuum we're operating with a lot of other states where we can get good ideas and we can see some bad ones. Well that's right and you can look at their policies you look them up online if we look actually I did recently look the top 10 fastest growing states in the last four years with populations over a million so big states that are growing of course Texas and Florida are on the list Tennessee but if you look all 10 of them are right-to-work states so they're competitive to bring in other employers all 10 of those states being right-to-work states empower employees and so employees can choose what's best for them four of those 10 for example don't have an income tax there's only seven states that don't have an income tax four of them are the top 10 fastest growing and that's just the beginning we can look at education we can look at infrastructure policy we can look at energy policy there's the point is there's a lot of things you can look at but you're absolutely right we should learn from others. There's a lot of wisdom to be learned and we can look around and at the policy forum we like to spend our time learning and growing and we'll steal the best ideas and we'll try to stay away from the worst ideas that's what we do at the policy forum so how do people spend our tax money it matters policy matters and if you want to know more about these discussions go to wmpolicyforum.com to dive into some more of the details hopefully you'll find that interesting and helpful as well but thanks for the time to join us here and we'll see you soon.