Despite what school officials want you to believe, Michigan legislators have made education a funding priority. Michigan would rank sixth nationally if looking at the percentage of total state and local taxes dedicated to education. Nationally, the average is 32.3 percent, and in Michigan it's 37.1 percent.

And when you break it down a little further...

Benefits spending in relation to total taxes is even more alarming. For every $100 Michigan collects in state and local taxes, $7.53 is used to pay for benefits. Nationally, it's $5.13 out of every $100. That difference represents over $1 billion annually in above-average benefit spending in Michigan...

Clearly this is still going to be a tough one for the legislature to tackle.  Any time you deal with benefits you open yourself up to the charge that you're attacking employees or that you're mean or that you just don't really care about people or that you're not serious about education or that you hate teachers or that... well... you get the point.  

But when we're talking about a billion dollars being spent above and beyond what other states are spending for the same service that's called an outlier.  And there's a lot of room there for change without even removing our best-in-class status.  

Will it make the MEA happy?  Yeah, no.  But state Reps and Senators aren't elected to serve the MEA.  They're elected to serve the voters and the taxpayers and with numbers like these it's clear there's a disconnect.  Compare these benefits to private sector benefits and it's even more pronounced.  

The state spends 25% MORE to provide health-care benefits alone, according to a Michigan benefit-consulting group.  That's not competitive.  And with a budget deficit over a billion dollars we can't afford it.  

Keep best-in-class.  Continue to provide better for our great educators than the other states.  Just add a little sanity to the approach.  Please.

Sanity's something that's severely lacking these days.  Look no further than Mark Brewer's boy John Edwards' statement a couple days ago that he'd tell people they weren't allowed to drive SUV's, regulating away the Big 3's most profitable vehicles and throwing a good-sized monkey wrench into their comeback efforts.  

Not what they need as performance reports start to emerge from the last quarter, indicating Chrysler didn't perform as well as they had.  According to the Associated Press:

DaimlerChrysler AG and its former partner Chrysler posted weaker results in the second quarter as their trans-Atlantic union dissolved, but executives said Wednesday they're optimistic about the rest of this year despite a sales slump in the U.S. market.

Sell them while you can, boys.  There's an entire political party out there gunning for you and every manufacturing job in Michigan.

And speaking of their leader, Edward's buddy Geoff Fieger is in the news again today and probably will be every day until his case is resolved.  Yesterday wasn't that day, despite his best efforts.  The FREEP reports:

"Under local rule .... The text of a brief supporting a motion or response, including footnotes and signatures, may not exceed twenty pages," U.S. District Judge Paul Borman wrote in an order striking the brief. He also noted that the type size and spacing on the brief violated court rules as well.

Fieger's motion and the brief supporting it was 31 pages and included another 100 plus pages of exhibits. Fieger's legal team is drafting a request today asking the court for permission to exceed the 20 page limit, said Thomas Cranmer, one of Fieger's lawyers.

One-hundred-thirty-one pages.  Instead of twenty.  In a motion to dismiss the charges.  Sounds like Geoff was trying to argue the entire case in the motion phase.  

Fieger-time finds himself under a pretty serious indictment for illegally funneling $127,000 into the Edwards for President campaign.  Serious charges.  So Edwards returned the cash, right?  Oh, right, sorry.  He refuses to return the cash.  

But the Democrat establishment is up in arms over this gross ethical violation.  They take money laundering and federal indictments seriously.  And they've got LOTS to say.  Here's a sampling of Dem response to Edward's refusal to hand over the money at the center of the massive federal investigation.

Democrat National Committee:  crickets chirping

Michigan Democrat Party: crickets chirping

Democrat POTUS Candidates:  crickets chirping

Regressisphere: crickets chirping

Huh... aren't these same groups all up in arms over every single alleged ethical violation (even when it isn't illegal, like Fieger-time's money laundering) in the GOP?  Well, at least they're consistent in their inconsistency.