Why did the Michigan Legislature push through the fiscal year 2012 budget – decimating many programs that help struggling children succeed – before it fully understood what the revenue picture for the coming year was?

It’s been decades since the Legislature passed a budget this early, but if they had just waited a few weeks many essential services that provide for the health, safety and education of our children could have been spared.

Haste makes waste, they say, and in the Michigan’s budget, the waste will be the lost opportunities to thousands of Michigan’s children.

Lawmakers met their arbitrary and speeded-up deadline by completing one of their most important responsibilities—deciding how the state’s scarce resources should be divided. But did the accelerated process result in good public policy? Does this budget help us move toward the outcomes the Governor has articulated in his “dashboard,” or more recently in his education address?

There are two sides to any budget:  the money raised (revenues and taxes), and the dollars spent.  On the revenue side, the recent actions of the Michigan Legislature and the Governor created a distinct shift in the tax burden from businesses to individuals, including a deep cut in the state’s Earned Income Tax credit (EITC). The EITC is a tax refund of about $400 per person that has kept thousands of working poor families out of poverty and off welfare. Earlier this year, we thought the EITC would be tossed out, even though in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan created the credit, saying it was the most effective way to help children and families in poverty. But, thanks to many advocates including Michigan’s Children working with key legislative leaders, the EITC was preserved for working poor families, albeit at six percent of the federal EITC when last year it was 20 percent.

On the spending side, there were troubling cuts that will make it even harder to move the dial on critical “dashboard” indicators, including child poverty, infant mortality and college readiness. For example, although we know that children who live in extreme poverty are less likely to be healthy and prepared for school, the budget eliminates basic income assistance for over 12,500 poor families with children, essentially eliminates the clothing allowance for poor children, continues to pare back spending for health prevention and promotion programs, and reduces funding for local public and mental health services. 

Further, even though the evidence is clear that too many Michigan young people will never have a toe-hold in the current workforce because they are dropping out of school, proven programs that provide youths with alternative paths to graduation, such as Middle Colleges, were defunded. 

There are some bright lights in this troubling budget. The Governor has focused on reading proficiency by third grade as a goal, and to that end, he and the Legislature supported early childhood programs that have been shown to increase achievement. The approval of a $6 million increase in the Great Start School Readiness Program is the kind of investment Michigan needs to begin the process of rebuilding its economy and workforce, and we applaud the Legislature’s wisdom in taking that step. Early childhood programs have the potential to move the state in the right direction, but the positive outcomes of early childhood education programs will be more difficult to sustain if other vital human services are decimated.

In addition to ensuring that children enter kindergarten ready to learn, we must guarantee that those schools are ready and able to build on early learning opportunities and provide high quality services that are linked to parents and communities. We must also guarantee investments in young people who struggle to stay in school or have already been disengaged. We need both ready kids and ready schools as we build a comprehensive P-20 (prenatal to age 20) system for learning in Michigan. Without them, efforts to improve schools and increase educational achievement will fail, and initiatives to expand access to higher education and modernize the state’s economy will not work.  

Legislative leaders and the Governor keep saying that steps taken over the last few months are needed to build our state’s future, and “shared sacrifice” is necessary to achieve our goals. But, how are we going to develop a young, creative and talented workforce for the future if we don’t provide the building blocks for their success?  In the end, the irony is that many of the priorities evident in the state’s 2012 budget will very likely work against the “dashboard” outcomes that the Administration wants to be evaluated against, and “shared sacrifice” still looks like disproportionate sacrifice by the most vulnerable among us. 

What we were repeatedly told by legislative leaders was that this budget is the best the state can do at this point in time.

But, these serious, harmful cuts were made before analyses of revenues were complete. Now, it looks like there will be another $500 million in revenues available in the current fiscal year and $660 million next year.

In other words, most of these cuts were not even necessary to balance the budget.

At times like these – when vulnerable kids have unmet medical needs, are coming to kindergarten unprepared to learn in a school setting, and are dropping out – it is plain wrong to knock out the few supports that exist.

We shouldn’t be talking about what we can do to help our children succeed, but what we should do.