Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Why Not Keep People from Leaving in the First Place?

Rick Snyder has things bass-ackwards.

As Michigan young people leave the state and the state gets older on average, Rick Snyder thinks the state should encourage legal immigrants to come to the state.

And they should bring their advanced degrees with them.

Why? Because Michigan itself doesn't want to spend any money to help its current residents get college degrees, advanced or otherwise. It wants to cut -- no, slash -- spending on education at all levels in order to give a $1.8 billion tax cut to business.

By asking well-educated immigrants to come to Michigan, Snyder is conceding that education is good for business and job creation, but he is turning around and cutting it off at the knees here in Michigan with cuts in K-12 and higher education.

Like lots of business interests, Snyder wants the benefits of a highly educated citizenry, he just expects somebody else to pay the freight for producing a highly educated citizenry.

Snyder is sending a pretty clear message to young people that they should leave the state when he not only makes it prohibitively expensive for them to get an education in Michigan, but he does his best to eliminate one path to employment for them -- the film industry.

One $80 million film studio recently opened in Michigan only because tax credits for the project were approved by Gov. Jennifer Granholm before Snyder announced his plan to put a stop to them.

By cutting education and stifling a new industry Snyder is creating a vacuum to be backfilled by people educated elsewhere.

Wouldn't it just make more sense to educate our own people and keep them here?

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