Gubernatorial Candidates In Glass Houses On Corporate Handouts

As the election to select a new governor draws near, Democrats who attack the Republican ticket of Bill Schuette and Lisa Posthumus Lyons for favoring “wealthy corporate special interests” may need to consider a different strategy or risk looking hypocritical.

When gubernatorial candidate Schuette tagged Lyons as his lieutenant governor candidate, Democratic supporters started repeating talking points.

AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber was quoted by MIRS News as saying, “The Schuette-Lyons ticket sounds like the DeVos dream team for rigging the rules in favor of wealthy corporate special interests. Lisa Lyons spent her time in Lansing attacking the freedoms of working people and their families. She voted to give a massive tax break to corporations and balanced the budget by taxing the pensions of hard-working seniors and cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in education funding.”

When it comes to giving favors to corporations, few lawmakers have voted for them more often than Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen Whitmer.

During her time in the Legislature, Whitmer voted for 98.1 percent of 30 new laws that authorized giving actual cash payments to particular corporations and developers, as determined in a recent policy brief published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. These 30 laws eventually resulted in the transfer of $4.5 billion in state taxpayer dollars to corporate interests. Whitmer opposed just one of the laws covered by the report, under which $87.5 million was given to private companies.

That doesn’t mean that Lisa Posthumus Lyons said “no” to corporate handouts though. Although she had fewer opportunities to vote on such measures, Lyons actually approved 100 percent of the laws that were passed during her six years in the House and covered by the study. Their passage had the effect of authorizing $280 million worth of corporate handouts.

Bill Schuette was a state senator for just two of the years covered by the Mackinac Center study, during which he voted “yes” on all three of the votes that were scored by it, resulting in some $224.2 million in cash subsidies to particular businesses.

The analysis looked at a total of 71 laws enacted since 2001 that authorized actual cash transfers to business owners, not just tax breaks or other benefits. Of these, 37 were considered “scoreable” votes. Many more corporate welfare bills were voted on during the terms of Lyons, Posthumus and Whitmer, and the three politicians favored most of them.

The Michigan AFL-CIO didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.