To be sure they were not popping the champagne corks and singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” In fact they called the event “boring.”
Yet the prognosticators reported that Michigan’s economy is “strong and stable,” and when quizzed about any dark clouds on the horizon, they uniformly dismissed it as, it not, folly, darn close to it.
Such was the lead story out of the gathering of the state’s top drawer bean counters/economists whose vital job is to predict how the state is growing and how much moola lawmakers will have to play with as they orchestrate the writing of the new state budget. A budget that spends $80 billion of your federal and state tax dollars.
“Today it is a little bit boring for forecasting the budget,” state Treasurer Rachael glowed reading to reporters from a carefully crafted script during a zoom scrum.
To buttress her analysis she submitted this, “tax collections are strong. Corporate, income taxes and interest rates are strong. There is economic growth and higher wages that is leading to higher income tax collections.”
And in case the scribes missed it she added, “the labor market was more than” the record years of 2001 and 2002.
All this meant that there was over $200 million more dollars that had come in since the last forecast in January.
There was curious sidebar angles on the main story however.
First of all the state treasurer and the state budget director Jen Flood are all governor appointees and so they are part of what the governor likes to call, “my team.” Left out of the zoom exchange was any representation from the house and senate fiscal agencies which are arms of the legislature and not on the gov’s “team.”
No one will confirm this but some may have wondered why they were not there as they have been in the past.
One unconfirmed theory is, since this an election year and the Democrats desperately want to keep control of the Michigan House, telling the voters back home that the Democrats have fashioned a great economy could help reach that objective. Hence why take a risk by inviting non team members who may add a different slant to the glowing economic forecasting thus taking the positive edge out off the message the governor and D’s want you to believe.
Secondly, everybody in town knows that the Detroit Three automakers have a bad case of EV heartburn as one of them noted it was losing thousands of dollars on every one sold and if the lousy EV sales were removed from the companies’ bottomline, it’s profits will skyrocket 50%.
So some snotty reporter asked Ms. Eubanks if she worried about that because the state takes in a boatload of tax dollars from the auto industry and all its workers and even a hiccup in that industry can choke off revenue for the state.
Ms. Eubanks stayed on the upbeat playbook refusing to budge other than to say, “I don’t think we’re at a troublesome point yet. We’re seeing really strong profit sharing happen with our major automakers and while there is that potential risk on the horizon, it’s not something we are seeing today.”
The key words, of course in her statement are the qualifiers i.e. not at a “troublesome point yet” and there is “that potential” but she was not seeing it “today.”
The gov’s team probably has collective finger’s crossed that if the EV’s do drag down auto industry revenue to the state that it will commence until after November 5th.
And then this. There’s sort an unwritten rule that the governor’s budget director stays above the political fray and sticks to his or her bean counting. But in this Zoom Ms. Flood took on the senate GOP leader Aric Nesbitt.
He blamed the governor for “raiding the teachers retirement” fund to pay for her K-12 spending proposals including a hefty increase in the per pupil state aid which is another democratic election year reelection selling point.
She surprisingly returned the volley with this tongue in cheek retort. “The minority leader has a new found support for teachers and retirees” as he has cut their support in the past.
It was frankly a great line which the GOP senator refuted as expected.
You have to wonder did she get an “atta-girl” embrace or a warning to stay in her own non-political lane?
Somebody call if you have the answer.
