Foggy as all get-out out doors. Foggier still on my TV. National politics used to be easy to comment on; now I just want to point at it and shrug.
At the state level, our Governor gave the yearly State of the State speech last evening. It looks like we're doing better than the neighboring states in terms of unemployment (three percent-ish), job growth, solvency of the state government and other metrics -- but when two of the neighboring states are Illinois and Michigan, looking better by comparison is kind of playing on the "easy" setting. Still, the state's doing well and more people are moving here than moving away, so that's good news.
"...and more people are moving here than moving away, so that's good news."
ReplyDeleteA curmudgeonly hermit (like me for instance) might not agree it's a good thing.
It's an indicator of percieved opportunity.
ReplyDeleteI live in Michigan. I would like to think that much of our problems is just the changing of our nation's economy from an manufacturing economy to a technological one. One with a lot of high tech jobs that run the gamut from internet gurus to social media savvy promoters, to everything that centers around those and even more.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I have lived in Michigan my entire nearly 6 decades of life, and I know better. Not unfortunately that I have lived in Michigan, because I find that we have much to offer, but only to a certain type of person. The unfortunate part is that I know that a big portion of our states economic and population problems has to do only partly with our nations changing economy, and our states job centers. Mostly, what I have seen is that many people have left because of poor management not only on the state level, but also on the local level.
At the state level, we have seen that played out on the National front with just the one thing, the Flint/Detroit water crisis. The thing that was not really discussed and shown, is that while much of the blame landed on the governor, John Engler, and ultimately I guess it does, a lot more of the blame should have gone to the Democratically controlled leadership of Flint.
The city of Flint had a certain amount of time left until they had to unhook from their water supply with the city of Detroit. For some reason, they did not want to continue to pay the city of Detroit the money that they were paying them, and instead, chose to hook up to the Flint river for their intake of raw water. Most people know the rest, but the things that happened are that the engineers failed to put proper additives in the water, to keep the pipes from leeching lead into the drinking water, and so that is what happened to a large number of the residents.
While Michigan has tremendous sports opportunities for the snow person, and the water lover, the outdoors person, the many other opportunities for some business have not been pushed as much as they could have been.
Small towns like Grand Haven and others, have sometimes used their proximity to the Lake Michigan shoreline to their advantage. Often, they suffer from the tourist economy, with many of the available jobs being related to the tourist industry, which pay less than those in industry and manufacturing. They do have some manufacturing, but many of the lakeshore towns discourage that.
And the main body of voters live in the Southeast part of the state, Detroit, Dearborn, Ann Arbor, etc. So those of us who live in other parts, like Muskegon, or the northern cities, have little say in what happens in the state, and as a result, often the Democrats tend to win the house and senate.
When Michigan does get a Republican Governor, it is not a decent one. John Engler did not do a lot of good for our state. But he tried to handcuff the incoming Democratic governor on his way out.