Michigan state legislature

While residents of beleaguered Flint face rate hikes for the city’s lead-poisoned water and Detroit sees teachers staging sickouts after lawmakers threatened to withhold their full salaries, the state treasury announced this week that Michigan businesses are to effectively pay nothing in taxes this year.

In fact, Michigan is projected to give corporations a net refund—even while it faces a budget shortfall of $460 million.

“Officials are projecting a net loss of $99 million in revenue from the state’s principal business taxes,” reported Detroit News, as corporations “effectively contribute nothing to the state coffers in 2016.”

This shortfall “should be a wake-up call for Lansing Republicans hell-bent on smothering government with cuts and miserly policy—and it shouldn’t be an excuse for lawmakers to withhold necessary help from the (mostly poor, mostly black) City of Flint and Detroit Public Schools,” argued the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press.

The cause of the budget shortfall is a confluence of recent tax code rewrites: automakers […]