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?
Showing posts with label 2010 Census. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010 Census. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Census Matters -- And It's Not a Government Plot
It wasn't too long ago that U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann was telling people not to cooperate with the 2010 census because it was a government plot.
Now it turns out the loony Minnesota Republican has figured out she might lose her seat in Congress if her constituents take her advice. That's because census results are used to allocate seats in Congress, which are based on population, and Minnesota is on the verge of losing one of its seats -- and it very well might be Bachmann's seat that disappears.
Beyond that, federal funds for many programs are allocated based on population so it's important for all states that their citizens fill out the census forms.
And no, it's not a socialist Obama plot to collect information and use it to control the public. The U.S. Constitution requires the census be done every 10 years, and while the initial purpose might have been to figure out how many military-age males the nation had, it quickly became useful for other purposes.
By the late 19th century, the government was asking where individuals were born, whether they spoke English, whether they were U.S. citizens, whether they could read or write, and so on. If an individual was a farmer, the government wanted to know if he or she owned it or rented it, how many acres were involved, what crops were raised and their value, how many and what kinds of livestock were maintained, and so on. It was a way for policy makers to get a snapshot of the nation.
The information remained confidential. Census results don't become public until 75 years later. Genealogists and historians now find them chock full of valuable information, even though the data may be inaccurate depending on which family members were available to answer the questions when the census-taker arrived.
I don't know how my ancestors felt about being asked questions about their livelihoods and backgrounds, but I know that I am grateful to them for answering the questions. I know a little bit more about who they were -- how prosperous they were or were not, compared to their neighbors, how hard they might have had to work on their farms, what they ate, and so on -- than I would otherwise. In many ways, the census answers makes them more three-dimensional for me, not just names on a birth certificate.
That's now why the census is taken, but it is a byproduct, and I'm glad it exists.
Now it turns out the loony Minnesota Republican has figured out she might lose her seat in Congress if her constituents take her advice. That's because census results are used to allocate seats in Congress, which are based on population, and Minnesota is on the verge of losing one of its seats -- and it very well might be Bachmann's seat that disappears.
Beyond that, federal funds for many programs are allocated based on population so it's important for all states that their citizens fill out the census forms.
And no, it's not a socialist Obama plot to collect information and use it to control the public. The U.S. Constitution requires the census be done every 10 years, and while the initial purpose might have been to figure out how many military-age males the nation had, it quickly became useful for other purposes.
By the late 19th century, the government was asking where individuals were born, whether they spoke English, whether they were U.S. citizens, whether they could read or write, and so on. If an individual was a farmer, the government wanted to know if he or she owned it or rented it, how many acres were involved, what crops were raised and their value, how many and what kinds of livestock were maintained, and so on. It was a way for policy makers to get a snapshot of the nation.
The information remained confidential. Census results don't become public until 75 years later. Genealogists and historians now find them chock full of valuable information, even though the data may be inaccurate depending on which family members were available to answer the questions when the census-taker arrived.
I don't know how my ancestors felt about being asked questions about their livelihoods and backgrounds, but I know that I am grateful to them for answering the questions. I know a little bit more about who they were -- how prosperous they were or were not, compared to their neighbors, how hard they might have had to work on their farms, what they ate, and so on -- than I would otherwise. In many ways, the census answers makes them more three-dimensional for me, not just names on a birth certificate.
That's now why the census is taken, but it is a byproduct, and I'm glad it exists.
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