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The
Michigan Socialist | News | Michigan
And you thought
things would be different under Granholm...
Privilege preserved as
state budget goes
bust
By MARTIN
SCHREADER
Editor, the Michigan
Socialist
THE MICHIGAN STATE legislature is still
controlled by the Republican Party. No clearer indication of
that can be seen than the new state budget, passed by the
State House at the time of this writing, and awaiting debate
in the State Senate.
Michigan is facing a budget deficit of at
least $2 billion for the coming fiscal year. Between the
economic recession and all the money being poured into useless
"homeland security" programs, working people are expected to
withstand the worst of the shortfall in the state's
treasury.
Most of the deepest cuts are in education.
More than two dozen school districts in Michigan will lose
funding under the current budget plan, including Detroit,
Flint, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Muskegon.
The Republican-sponsored plan reduces
per-pupil spending in those districts that had been receiving
extra funds to reduce overcrowding in classrooms. In Flint and
Grand Rapids, these cuts mean a loss of almost $1 million in
each district. Kalamazoo and Muskegon will each lose about
half that much.
By far, the Detroit Public Schools will take
the biggest loss. A $15 million grant, a "consolation prize"
for the city coming out of the bipartisan effort to strip its
residents of the right to vote, was eliminated. House
Republicans were clear that the main reason for eliminating
the grant was the current effort to place a referendum on the
ballot in November to return to an elected School
Board.
At the same time, while some of the poorest
school districts in the state are expected to have even less
than the paltry funding they have received over the last
decade, the state Republicans have managed to preserve full
funding for the so-called "Merit Scholarships."
These scholarships, set up by former Governor
John Engler in the 1990s, are given mostly to students in
wealthy districts whose school funding is not being cut, and
whose state representatives are usually
Republicans.
Within all this "slash-and-burn" economics of
the state Republicans, though, there is a small silver lining.
The budget restores a little more than half of the $10.2
million Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm had cut from the
funding of math and science centers around the
state.
The math and science centers are used by many
school districts, including many poor and struggling areas, to
supplement the standard teaching curriculum and help teachers
with turning students on to these subjects.
House Republicans have also targeted the
Michigan Economic Development Corporation for massive cuts in
order to fund its "Merit Scholarships." The MEDC has two main
tasks: doling out corporate welfare, and coordinating job
training and vocational education in inner-city
areas.
While few would likely have a problem with
taking the ax to the tens of millions in corporate welfare
handed out every year by the state government, the
Republicans' plan will also leave thousands of unemployed
workers with no means of receiving the training needed to get
a decent job.
If there is anything we can learn from the
budget fight, it is that the working people of Michigan -- to
say nothing of the people of the state in general -- should
not place any faith or reliance on these "representatives" to
pass a budget that benefits us.
Obviously, the Republicans have no interest in
drafting a budget that would place people's needs before those
of the corporations. But, as the case with the math and
science centers shows, the Democrats are really no
better.
Moreover, the "fight" between the Democrats
and Republicans is not whether or not the school funding
should be cut, or whether or not "Merit Scholarships" are
preserved, but how much of the school funding will be cut, and
how much of the "Merit Scholarship" funding will be
preserved.
It is a question of degrees for them, not
fundamentals.
Everyone in Michigan should keep this in mind
for next year, when there will be independent Socialist
candidates on the ballot running for the state
legislature. | 
