Detroit Free Press Editorial: Don't Eliminate Earned Income Credit

An editorial viewpoint from the Detroit Free Press:

"Lawmakers need to push back against Gov. Rick Snyder's plan to end the Michigan Earned Income Tax Credit. Tax credits for low-income workers not only give people an incentive to work but also circulate quickly through the economy because they put money into the hands of people who need to spend it immediately.

On average, the credit yields $432 a year for more than 700,000 working families and individuals. The state credit is set at 20% of the amount that the federal government formula allots for its Earned Income Tax Credit...

The flat-rate income tax is embedded in the state Constitution, and voters last fall rejected an opportunity to rewrite it. Without constitutional change, the Earned Income Tax Credit may be the only tool to protect and encourage workers with the most meager incomes."

www.freep.com/article/20110308/OPINION01/103080317/0/SPORTS02/Editorial-Axing-Earned-Income-Tax-Credit-would-hurt-poor-state?odyssey=nav|head

Unique Calhoun County Program Offers Dental Care in Exchange for Volunteerism

One son needing braces is expensive enough, but twin brothers with wonky teeth?

It would have cost Karen Peterson more than $12,000 for her 12-year-old fraternal twins to get braces if not for a unique program that quietly began last year in Calhoun County.

"My boys couldn't have gotten their teeth fixed without it," Peterson said. "They would have had to go through life with teeth like mine."

Four years after the successful launch of the Dentists' Partnership, a Community HealthCare Connections program in which local dentists provide free care in exchange for patients volunteering in the community, a similar program for orthodontists and low-income patients has developed.

Tentatively named Better Smiles for a Better World, the program requires a deeper commitment from both the orthodontist and the patients because of the time and expenses incurred.

But the program has the potential to help deserving children get a better start in life, with confidence in their smiles and the knowledge that they have passed the favor forward.

And the idea has started to catch on.

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20110306/NEWS01/103060307/1002/news01/Program-provides-braces-kids

Cutting Business Taxes: Not a Solution to Michigan's Unemployment

Even business is not convinced that reducing business taxes by 86% and raising personal income taxes by 32% will improve our state's financial fortunes and add jobs. In fact, one writer for Michigan Business says:

"... where (Governor Snyder's) justification for business tax cuts falls apart is in his contention that easing the tax burden on businesses will “enable all businesses and industries, large and small, to grow and create jobs.”

Republicans have been making this claim since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, but there’s little evidence that cutting taxes leads to job growth.

Michigan cut taxes throughout much of the past decade, but still lost nearly 850,000 jobs.

I know — you’re dubious of the claim Michigan cut taxes.

But the state tax burden — taxes as a percentage of personal income — has fallen from 9.5 percent to 7 percent over the past decade, according to the Senate Fiscal Agency.

Michigan was the only state in the country to experience a general fund revenue decline between 2000 and 2009, according to state Treasurer Andy Dillon.

State business tax revenues have fallen 15 percent since fiscal 2008, the year the MBT was enacted.

And Michigan’s business tax climate, which includes sales, personal income, business and unemployment taxes, jumped to 17th last year from 28th in 2006, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.

That included a period in which Michigan’s personal income tax rate jumped from 3.9 percent to 4.35 percent and the MBT, with its 22 percent surcharge, was implemented.

The MBT should be replaced, if for no other reason than to simplify what is an unnecessarily complex tax.

But it’s apparently not the jobs killer that Snyder and many lawmakers claim."

www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/03/rick_haglund_history_doesnt_pr.html

Child Abuse Reports Spike in Allegan County

Allegan County children are more than twice as likely to be confirmed victims of child abuse than they were in 2000, according to information released by Kids Count Michigan, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to track child welfare across the United States.

The county has seen a 112-percent increase in the number of confirmed victims of child neglect or abuse from .6 percent in 2000 to 1.4 percent in 2009 of county children.

The report also showed increases in the number of children living in families investigated for abuse and the number of children living in out-of-home care.

Increased awareness

The rise in confirmed victims may not be the result of more children being victimized, said Safe Harbor Children’s Advocacy Center executive director Lori Antkoviak. “There is better community awareness that there is a problem with child sexual and physical abuse,” Antkoviak said. “Part of the problem in the past is people didn’t know what to look for.”

While people often recognized that children who were victims had behavioral problems, many members of the public did not know that abuse could be an underlying cause, she said.

Safe Harbor in Allegan and other child advocacy groups throughout the state have worked hard to educate the public about abuse during the past decade, she said.

“It was being done in the past,” she said. “People just didn’t know what to do about it or how to stop it.”

www.allegannews.com/articles/2011/03/04/local_news/3.txt

Homeless Man Found Dead in Abondoned Garage

Cars speed by the spot where Brent King died, hidden behind the cold white steel of a abandoned garage, his tomb for the past month until his discovery Wednesday.

No one really knows how long Brent King's body lay lifeless in the garage. He was discovered by police lying on a mattress in the rear of the two-car garage at 1804 S. Main St. An employee at the Center for the Homeless called police to report King missing earlier in the day, saying he hadn't been spotted since Jan. 23, when the overnight temperatures dipped into negative numbers.

Deputy coroner Nancy Pemberton said an autopsy showed King likely died of hypothermia, although toxicology tests are still pending.

"The last time someone had talked to him was in January," Pemberton said. "He'd been there for about a month."

www.southbendtribune.com/article/20110304/News01/103040322/-1/XML

According to a police report, King would make weekly appearances at the homeless center, where he would make calls to his parents and sometimes receive packages.

A Mother in Ohio Serves Jail Time for Lying to a Wealthy School District About Her Daughters' Residence

Would you go to jail to give your children a better education? How about falsifying documents? Would you claim your kids live with a grandparent so they could attend an elite – but still public – suburban school?

And how would you feel about someone who did?

The case of Kelley Williams-Bolar – who served nine days in jail for falsifying documents to enroll her children in a wealthier and safer school district – has sparked more reactions than a Rorschach test.

Supporters are outraged that an Ohio county prosecuted and convicted this low-income single mom, whom some see as a modern-day Rosa Parks, challenging an unfair system through a type of civil disobedience.

School-choice advocates want to make her their poster mom.

Critics see her as a poor role model, repeatedly lying and "stealing" an education from a district where she didn't pay taxes.

The case has tapped into debates about educational equity, as schools are funded largely through widely varying local tax bases, says Piet Van Lier, an education researcher at Policy Matters Ohio in Cleveland.

For Ms. Williams-Bolar's supporters, the punishment doesn't fit the crime. "We see it as a grave injustice that she was prosecuted and convicted of two felonies which could destroy her life, for what at most should have been a civil court dispute," says David Singleton, executive director of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center in Cincinnati, which is providing legal counsel for a possible appeal.

www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0225/Jail-time-for-sneaking-kids-into-a-better-school-Was-justice-served

NOTE: Many wealthier school districts in Michigan also do not participate in schools of choice or severely restrict the numbers of children from neighboring districts who are allowed to attend their district.

Battle Creek Enquirer: Public Schools Brace for Deep Funding Cuts

For years, it has cost more to educate the area's children than the state steered to local schools, a gap that's expected to widen as Gov. Rick Snyder calls for cuts to K-12 funding to cover the exhaustion of federal stimulus funds and other shortfalls in Lansing.

The 21 school districts in the (Battle Creek) Enquirer's coverage area spent a combined $5.7 million more than they took in between the 2007-08 and 2009-10 school years, according to an Enquirer analysis of schools' financial documents. And, as of early February, districts were projecting a combined $4.2 million shortfall this school year alone, though the final budgets usually come in somewhat better than originally projected. The share of districts' savings spent to cover yearly deficits doubled every year, the analysis found.

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20110227/NEWS01/102270333/1002/news01/Public-schools-brace-deep-funding-cuts

Letter to the Editor in Support of the Homeless

Recently, I was engaged in one of my favorite volunteer activities. As a volunteer site coordinator for the volunteer income tax assistance (VITA) program in Berrien County, it is my pleasure to assist working class and low income residents with their annual tax return. One of the things I do in that capacity is review the tax returns prepared by other volunteers to ensure that they are prepared accurately.

In the process of my reviews, I usually have a brief opportunity to chat with our clients. In the review of one client's return, I noticed that she did not have any Michigan renter's credit indicated on her return. Her income indicated to me that she certainly would qualify for that credit. I thought maybe her tax preparer had simply forgotten to ask her a question about her rent. So, I asked her the question:

"Did you pay rent last year?"

Her answer was quite simple:

"I was homeless last year."

You know I had to fight back some emotion at that point. And I looked at her W2 wage and tax statement a little more closely. She had been employed by the shelter where she probably had stayed while homeless.

I suppose that there are as many reasons that a person is homeless as there are homeless people. No two stories are the same.

Coincidentally, the following letter to the editor appears in this week's Niles Daily Star:

Dear editor:

I’m writing about the homeless people in the Niles area.

I have seen a group of people together to stay warm over this cold weekend. We have Polly’s Place for women. Sure would be nice if the city of Niles would have a house for homeless people who lost a job and everything, and also young people who have acted up and were told to get out of the house, still not ready to face the real world.

We are so lucky to have a warm house. Think of these people out in the cold night.

Thank you. Take care.

Nancy Shufelt

Niles

COMMENT:

I don't know Nancy. But, my comment on her letter is THANK-YOU!

You can find her letter online at:

www.nilesstar.com/2011/01/26/the-homeless-need-help/

Muskegon Community Mental Health to Sponsor Exhibit About Society's Treatment of the Mentally Ill

A traveling exhibit designed to raise difficult and compelling questions about mental-health issues is being brought to the community in the fall by Muskegon County’s Community Mental Health department.

A portable version of a major New York State Museum exhibition seen by more than 600,000 visitors during its nine-month run, called “The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic,” attempts to draw attention to people who were committed to mental institutions in the early- to mid-20th century. The exhibit is based on patients’ suitcases discovered after Willard Psychiatric Center in New York’s Finger Lakes region closed in 1995.

The traveling exhibit is set to run Oct. 19-Nov. 30 at the Frauenthal Center for the Performing Arts, 425 W. Western (in Muskegon.)

www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2011/02/muskegon_county_community_ment.html

New Report: High Quality Pre-School Makes a Difference

The Citizens Research Council (CRC), a respected Lansing based think-tank, recently released a report on the importance of high quality pre-school programs. The full report is quite extensive. The summary is four pages and an easier read.

The summary says in part:

"High quality early childhood education and preschool programs that implement best practices have been shown to improve school success and graduation rates for disadvantaged children. This paper, one in a series of papers that CRC is publishing on important education issues facing Michigan, describes programs that invest in the “front end” of formal education: kindergarten, Head Start, and Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program. It also describes research on brain development that helps to explain why investing in early education may be a more effective strategy than other strategies that are being pursued.

The educational achievement gap between poor and non-poor children, and between minority and White children, has been at the center of education policy discussions for decades. Although it narrowed from 2005 to 2009, the achievement gap between White and Black fourth grade students in Michigan remains among the largest in the nation. Furthermore, Michigan
institutions of higher learning topped the lists of both public and private colleges and universities with the largest White-Black graduation rate gaps: Wayne State had the largest gap among public universities and Lawrence Technological University had the largest gap among private colleges and universities. Both the K-12 system and higher education are challenged
to address an achievement gap that, for many children, develops prior to school enrollment."


The CRC summary of the pre-school study can be found at:

www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2010s/2011/memo1104.pdf