Archive for October, 2011

Dan Calabrese

There is no conceivable reason a second bridge between Detroit and Windsor should be controversial. Infrastructure to facilitate commerce and trade is as basic a function of government as you can possibly find.

And yet Michigan Republicans, particularly those in the state Senate, can’t seem to get past the idea that such a bridge – if built using public funds – would be a “government bridge.”

The Ambassador Bridge is a notable exception, but just about all bridges are government bridges. Just as the highway interchanges surely championed by the very same senators who object to the government bridge – if requested by local officials in their districts – are “government highway interchanges.”

This is one of the things government does. It builds infrastructure, and that includes bridges.

It is not unusual, when government proposes to spend money on infrastructure, that people question whether a project is needed, or whether the costs are reasonable. And sometimes the project may not be needed, and the costs may not be reasonable. It is very unusual, however, when the debate is not whether the infrastructure should be built, but whether it should be built by government or by a private party that has designs on a bridge monopoly, as Matty Moroun does.

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Jocelyn Benson

I am proud to be a part of Wayne State University Law School’s Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights.  And contrary to anti-government rhetoric that is popular in some circles these days, it is a good example of how successful people in the private sector and dedicated public servants in government can work together to achieve remarkable things.

This week was a banner week for us. We celebrated the official opening of the building that will house the Center, which is dedicated to furthering Judge Keith’s legacy as one of our country’s greatest civil rights leaders and jurists.

As the Center’s associate director and a former clerk to Judge Keith, I’ve had the opportunity to see this Center and the building grow from an idea in the mind of Judge Keith’s network of supporters, mentees and former law clerks to one of the cornerstones of Wayne Law’s programming.

In fact, I distinctly remember, during my clerkship with Judge Keith nearly a decade ago, observing the initial conversations around the idea to build a Center for Civil Rights at Wayne Law, dedicated to Judge Keith.  It was one of the primary reasons I decided to accept an offer to teach at Wayne Law following my clerkship.

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Herman Cain

One of my favorite criticisms of my 9-9-9 tax reform plan is the one where people indicate they would support the plan if only we could find a way to guarantee Congress could never change the rates in the future.

They must really like the plan to ask for that. Has any other presidential candidate ever been asked to guarantee that the tax rates he proposed could never be changed?

I realize, of course, that much of this owes to the introduction of a new federal tax – the consumption tax – as part of the equation. It makes people nervous because they figure politicians can’t raise a tax that doesn’t exist. So once the consumption tax is in place, they say, 9 percent will only be the starting point for politicians to raise it and the other taxes, and 9-9-9 quickly becomes 10-10-10, 11-11-11 and who knows what else?

That’s why it’s nice to have respected economist Arthur Laffer bring a little reality to the discussion in a piece he wrote last week for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Laffer, you might remember, was the originator of the Laffer Curve, a notion in economics that demonstrates you get diminishing returns from higher marginal tax rates because they discourage investment and economic growth. Specifically, his Laffer Curve showed that you can collect the same amount of revenue from a lower marginal rate as you can from a higher marginal rate because of the impact the rates have on the economy.

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Dan Calabrese

If there’s one thing the City of Detroit will never be confused with, it’s a transportation company. At least not a serious one.

In the transportation industry, there are essentially two different kinds of vehicle fleets. One would be described as a for-hire carrier. These are companies like Schneider National, J.B. Hunt or Ryder. They don’t have any of their own cargo to ship, but they work via contract to haul other people’s cargo.

Then you have the private fleet, which would be owned by a company that is not in the transportation business per se, but has enough shipping volume that it’s economical for them to own and operate their own trucks. The biggest private fleet in the world belongs to Wal-Mart, which is actually a bigger trucking company than most actual trucking companies.

Companies in both categories have to manage their drivers, closely monitor their fuel costs and, of crucial importance, manage their maintenance operations well.

This is why, if any fleet in the private sector operated like the Detroit Department of Transportation, it would not stay in the business for a week.

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Robert Laurie

Hollywood loves Democrats. Democrats love the fact that the government owns GM. So it only makes sense that Government Motors is ready to get in bed with Hollywood. After all, when you’re a car company awash in taxpayer funding, making a movie is the next obvious step, right? It’s only a question of finding the right material.

According to multiple sources, the brain trust at GM has found its muse. The car company is in talks to revive the early ‘80s cheeseball film franchise “Cannonball Run.”

The rumored plan is to feature all of General Motors’ 2014 vehicles in a “major motion picture” that would amount to a massive, costly, two-hour commercial. Film producer Al Ruddy – who produced the original Cannonball films – is returning, and British director Guy Ritchie is on the short list to helm the project. Ritchie would like to see Brad Pitt step into Burt Reynolds’s starring role – and set the whole thing in Europe.

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David Karki

Yet another Republican presidential “debate” was held last night in Nevada, and it followed the about the same script as all the rest of them:  the biased moderator of the biased network airing it asks one falsely premised “gotcha” question after another;  the much-too-numerous candidates meekly oblige in answering them in 30-60 second sound bites, looking ever less presidential in the process (and in the case of Romney and Perry, downright juvenile); and, right on cue, the circular firing squad forms once again as the real target – President Obama – is scarcely even mentioned, much less gone after full-bore by every participant, as he should be.

That sound you hear is Obama laughing hysterically as he sits upon his billion bucks of campaign cash, ready to viciously smear so as to finish off whomever his media allies have spent the primaries bloodying up (and, if it’s Romney, forcibly crowning as early as possible). After all, he can’t run on his own awful record, not that you’d know he has one if you’ve watched these absurd “debate” spectacles.

Are we really supposed to believe that a bunch of fools too blind to see how they’re being manipulated and controlled has what it takes to defeat a megalomaniacal street punk who’ll be more than happy to unleash his ranks of ignorant and psychotic leftist radicals to occupy something other than Wall Street? Are we supposed to place our hope in one of a group who can’t even manage to demand that their debates be aired and moderated by people not explicitly part of the opposition? Read the rest of this entry »

James Melton

Is OWS a rebellion in search of a cause? To some extent, it is. But never fear, I am here to help.

As I said I would in my previous column, I have spent some time hanging out with the Detroit OWS crowd. No, I have not been camping out in Grand Circus Park. I am not committed enough to my craft to sleep in a drafty tent in October. But I attended the group’s initial meeting and have spent some time visiting the “occupation” site. Based on that experience, I have learned a few things:

First, some of the hangers-on in the OWS crowd really are the sort of garden-variety radical nuts one sees selling communist newspapers on college campuses. But for the most part, the OWS crowd is not crazy, not anti-American and not particularly anti-capitalism. They are just ticked off.

Second, the OWS movement, which is moving into its second month, is pretty clear about what it is against. In a nutshell, most OWS participants think the roughly 1 percent of Americans who can afford to buy members of Congress have rigged the economy in their favor. They want that to stop.

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Brett Noel

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© 2011 North Star Writers Group

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Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Dan Calabrese

Critics of innovative ideas frequently fall back on the knock that such ideas fail to serve as “panaceas.” That’s a hell of a standard to impose, but sometimes the champions of these ideas make it easy with the way they talk about their favored innovations.

It’s like that with charter schools in Michigan. They are certainly not cure-alls. Many of them don’t perform that much better than the traditional public schools that serve their areas. Some perform worse. And the defenders of the public school establishment tend to point this out as evidence that the last thing we need is more of them.

But if Michigan gets more charter schools, as a bill working its way through the Legislature (and already passed 20-18 in the Senate) would provide, what no one can deny is that families would have more options in determining the individual education paths of their children.

Political and media types tend to want to measure the performance of school districts and school buildings as a whole. The people who run these school districts and buildings are keenly aware of this, which is why they obsess over things like MEAP testing, which is going on right now. My son, who is in sixth grade in Grandville, has been subjected to “MEAP preparation” since the very first day of school. Now that the testing has actually begun, we’re being reminded daily to make sure he gets lots of sleep and eats a healthy breakfast every day. (Ha. You try to get him to eat healthy.)

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Eric Baerren

Michigan’s roads are crumbling, its schools are falling apart and unemployment is once again on the rise among its citizens. Yet last week the state House of Representatives waged war on something else. They pushed Michigan one step closer to being one of two states that have thrown off the yoke of federal oppression, at least when it comes to light bulbs.

Back in 2007, Congress passed a bill that required all bulbs manufactured in the United States to meet a series of graduated efficiency standards, and the law would have the effect of causing all old-style incandescent light bulbs to be phased out of use. At the time, the standards attracted very little attention, probably because they were crafted with the help and support of the light bulb manufacturing industry. In testimony before Congress, those manufacturers said that they wanted stability and predictability in the marketplace that a single, unified standard would provide. What they didn’t want were all 50 states going out and creating their own efficiency standards, which, in the name of dear sweet freedom, is what 64 House members voted for last week.

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