Tag: Work

Where I’ve Been

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted here, as virtually all my time this year has been spent on The Center for Economic Accountability, where I’m the president and one of the founding board members.

I’ll keep this site for stuff that doesn’t relate to my work on behalf of transparency, accountability and free-market-based reforms of state and local economic development policy, but for the most part you should be paying attention to the CEA’s website (or Facebook page, or Twitter feed) if you want to see what I’m working on at any given time.

(I’m not quite sure why anyone would, but life’s full of mysteries. Thanks for visiting.)

Op-ed in the Des Moines Register

DMRI’m proud to have co-written an op-ed in the Des Moines Register with John Hendrickson of Iowans for Tax Relief. Iowa’s politicians have gone hog-wild (pun intended) for economic development subsidies, and it’s time for the state’s taxpayers to have the transparency and accountability they need to decide whether or not they’ve gotten a good deal for their money.

Op-ed in The Oakland Press

Oakland PressMy most recent op-ed on economic development ran in The Oakland Press this week. In it, I try to get the reader to think about whether or not the stakeholders in economic development subsidies are generally telling us the truth about what’s going on, and what we should require of them in the process.

Transit tax op-ed in the Detroit News

DN squareMy latest Detroit News op-ed takes on the “we must have public mass transit if we’re going to compete for companies like Amazon” argument. If giant tech companies think their employees need help getting around metro Detroit, they can run their own shuttle services like they do in Silicon Valley rather than asking the region’s taxpayers to foot the bill.

Detroit News op-ed: Simply adding more voters won’t make our government more representative

DN squareThe Detroit News published another op-ed from me today, taking on the proposed voting reform ballot initiative. I think most of the practical fixes are decent ideas (other than the restoration of straight-ticket voting) but I think the realistic effect of adding more unengaged voters will be an increase in candidates winning on name recognition or partisan ID rather than their merits.

I think the real lesson here is that if we’re this dysfunctional at choosing the people who run our government, we should probably rethink how much power we give that government — and those people — over our lives.

New Detroit News Op-Ed: Differentiate Michigan By Ending Corporate Welfare

DN squareThe Detroit News published a new op-ed from me this week, in which I argue that if Michigan can’t even make it into the top 20 for the Amazon subsidy game then we should stop playing altogether. Let’s compete as the one state that doesn’t take money from working families and small businesses and hand it to giant corporations and billionaires.

New Articles: Federal Budget Dysfunction and FOIA Delay Games

Two articles published today, and there’s a serendipitous common theme of people in government doing what’s best for themselves rather than what’s best for their constituents.

At Think Freely Media, I make the point that any discussion of the “federal budget process” should start from the basic point that we really don’t have “federal budgets” any more, at least in terms of how most people think of a budget. That’s great if you’re a politician or lobbyist; not so good if you’re a taxpayer.

Once politicians get our money, it’s a core tenet of representative democracy that we should be able to keep tabs on what they’re doing with it. That’s why we have FOIA, the Open Meetings Act and other transparency laws. Michigan’s already one of the worst states in the country for transparency, but the City of Detroit seems to have found a new way to get around the FOIA law’s requirements: They told me closing their Law Department for a week paused their 15-day deadline to respond to my FOIA request: Detroit FOIA response

Journalism and transparency advocates think this is a terrible precedent to set.

New Article at Think Freely Media on Socialism and Starvation in Venezuela

I’ve got a new article in Think Freely Media’s “What Should Be Said” series, looking at the rhetoric from Venezuela’s socialist leadership versus the reality of societal collapse in a formerly prosperous country: Venezuelan Socialists Blame Capitalism for Socialism’s Starvation.