Understanding Government

Overlooked in the agreement reached by Barack Obama and Congress on the debt ceiling is that an entire federal agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — has shut down with Congress on vacation until September. That means, among other issues,  that the agency has no authorization to keep funding projects like the expansion of O’Hare airport in Chicago or, as Nathan Hurst of the Detroit News reports on today, the reconstruction of a taxi way at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

The agency has shut down because of a dispute over how airline workers can unionize and how much subsidies should be provided to rural airports. These are fairly significant issues — but ones that a Congress that cares in the slightest about a functional aviation agency should have been able to solve.

This blog has looked a lot at the federal money available, and unavailable, to clean the Great Lakes. Laura Fosmire of Wisconsin’s Ashland Current has an in-depth look at the issue of money for monitoring beach contamination, clearly an unavoidable issue, especially with the atrocious heat wave that has hit the Great Lakes region in the last week.

Naturally, there’s a major funding issue here: Ohio gets almost as much money as Michigan, even though Michigan has three times as many beaches. The funding formula used by the EPA doesn’t sufficiently take into account the fact that Michigan and Wisconsin have a lot of beaches — many which become very popular when it gets up to 95 degrees each day.

This is pretty interesting: Rick Snyder, Michigan’s newly elected governor and a Republican, gave a speech at Wayne State University yesterday extolling the economic virtues of immigrants. Kim Kozlowoski of the Detroit News reports that Snyder and Michael Bloomberg were the premier speakers at a conference called “Immigration & Michigan’s Economic Future.”

Obviously, Detroit could use international immigrants, Indiana immigrants, really any immigrants to restore its rapidly dwindling population. But it seems politically risky for a national Republican figure to encourage immigration. Perhaps the chances of immigration reform are so dead that Republicans are no longer nervous about the issue.

Michigan gets $1.64 back from the federal government for every $1 it provides in taxes, according to Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press. As new Republican Gov. Rick Snyder points out, this is nothing to be proud of. Michigan doesn’t get a lot of money because the federal government has invested in its economy (this statistic does not include the auto bailouts). The ratio is because the state is poor and doesn’t generate a lot of tax revenue. And it has a relatively high percentage of residents on public assistance.

An advocacy group in Michigan for medical marijuana has appealed a federal judge’s ruling that lets Obama administration drug agents look at the records of certain medical marijuana patients, reports John Agar of the Grand Rapids Press. The desire by drug agents to snoop around the files of medical marijuana patients is another indication that, after some initial steps to the contrary, the Obama administration has earnestly continued the “War on Drugs.” But it also indicates Michigan’s ambivalent support of its own law: the state’s attorney general is a medical marijuana opponent who refused to defend the state’s law in court.