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Straight Talk

By James Hettinger
Senior Advisor, Battle Creek Unlimited
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• The key to Michigan’s recovery is probably not to be found in any contemplation of “best practices.” The key to Michigan’s recovery lies within “next practices.”
• Playing “dodge-a-hole” on Michigan’s rural roads, I wonder where mass consumer acceptance of the electric car will leave the gas tax.
• A very helpful way for Michigan’s four major research institutions to make a significant impact on state economic development policy is to require professors to start companies as part of the tenure track process. Re-orient the reward structure for tenure in favor of enterprise formation. Other states have done this.
• My Grand Rapids friends and associates ask if Michigan really does need another medical school. Because of my affiliation with Western Michigan University, I just assume they are not asking about new medical schools at Central Michigan or Oakland Universities. In spite of all that, Michigan probably does need another medical school. I sit on the boards of three different healthcare institutions and I am bombarded by lugubrious predictions of a significant paucity of healthcare professionals, particularly medical practitioners. Further, a medical school at Western Michigan University could grow upon a regionalizing healthcare system, the V.A. Hospital, and the many, many unique healthcare programs that populate the Battle Creek/Kalamazoo area.

The receipt of a $100 million donation to the WMU medical school is certainly evidence that somebody sees the need for a new medical school and is willing to ante up the resources needed.

On a positive note for Grand Rapids friends, the WMU medical school will bring more “mass” or more “professional density” to West Michigan. Since Holland, Grand Rapids, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo are all within commuting distance, another medical school makes the recruiting of talent and the accommodation of heavily degreed “trailing spouses” a far more manageable task.

This looks like an opportunity for the fences to come down and for the region to promote itself as an opportunity area where medical education and research has joined pharmaceutical sciences, material sciences, life sciences and food sciences as the economic arteries of a new West Michigan.

Besides, at least, WMU is not starting a new law school.

• In the time of federal and state budget stress, we are hearing overbearing, archaic hyperbole about “tax breaks for the rich.” And how, pray tell, under the current watch did one of America’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations, General Electric, avoid paying any taxes in our country? Where is the righteous indignation? A rich, highly profitable U.S.-based corporation, the same one that employs an army of lobbyists trying to force the Defense Department to accept a jet engine it doesn’t need, got away without paying any taxes. I mean I knew President Obama was fond of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, but isn’t this a bit ridiculous? So when it comes to tax breaks for the rich, let us stay consistent. We should end tax breaks and subsidies to rich corporate farms, i.e., agricultural subsidies. We should end tax breaks for billionaires seeking to promote alternative energy and other crony capitalists who have found that playing the “hope and change” game was simply nothing more than business as usual.

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