CNN LOU DOBBS TONIGHT Aired January 14, 2008 - 19:00 ET
LOU DOBBS, CNN ANCHOR: The three leading Republican presidential candidates tonight are in Michigan in advance of tomorrow's primary election. The focus is on jobs. Michigan, of course, has been hard-hit on employment that lost jobs in Michigan for seven years in a row. As Christine Romans now reports, Michigan's shrinking middle class tax base and fewer job opportunities are creating serious challenges for that state's public education system.
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ROMANS (voice-over): Detroit is a place where the auto jobs are disappearing and the public schools are struggling with the lowest graduation rates in the country. It's a vicious cycle.
CINDY BROWN, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: You just can't make new investments in education when your revenue base is declining because of your economy.
ROMANS: Fewer jobs mean fewer opportunities for those who graduate. And as the tax base erodes, so does the revenue needed to shore up failing schools and prepare students for a global economy, a global economy that has decimated the state's middle class manufacturing base. Michigan's unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, 7.4 percent according to the Labor Department. Michigan has lost jobs for seven straight years, the longest losing streak since the Great Depression, 450,000 jobs gone, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.
DONALD GRIMES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN: We're going to lose jobs again in 2008. People talk about the one-state recession. You could almost say Michigan's been in a one-state depression.
ROMANS: The state rapidly losing high-paying jobs in autos, manufacturing, construction, and gaining a smaller number of jobs in education, services and hospitality. According to Michigan economists, those jobs pay half, at best, what the jobs that are lost paid. Michigan's governor calls her state the epicenter of the global shift of manufacturing jobs and blames Washington.
GOV. JENNIFER GRANHOLM (D), MICHIGAN: We're mad as hell. We are mad as hell at these unfair trade agreements.
ROMANS: Others say the causes are much more complicated. Bad mistakes and industry, health care costs, whatever the reason, most agree when those jobs go, so do opportunities and resources for education.
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ROMANS: A new report from "Education Week" magazine gives public schools in Michigan as a whole a grade of C. But last year, the same group estimated only a quarter of Detroit freshmen graduate four years later. The school district says it's more like 61 percent. Either way, unless the economy improves, there is not much hope for ailing public schools especially in those struggling big cities.
DOBBS: We just heard Governor Granholm in your report say they're mad as hell. But think about what that state is putting up with. I understand Governor Granholm is a Democrat. I understand that there are lots of issues there. But for the people of Michigan to tolerate these two political parties basically telling them to go to hell when they have the leading unemployment rate in the country, when they have had the longest standing loss of jobs of any state in this country, there's something wrong with the people in Michigan if they put up with this kind of nonsense.
There's sure as the dickens something wrong with their elected representatives to put up with this. And there's something wrong with those two political parties to look at that kind of pain, that kind of suffering, the impact of these idiotic faith-based trade policies, by the way, initiated by both President Clinton and President Bush and carried out to a vengeance by this president. There's something wrong when all this is just being allowed to stand. This should not stand in the United States of America.
ROMANS: Of all that pain and suffering that you mentioned, Lou, of that there is absolutely no doubt on the campaign trail, among the people in Michigan, among the politicians on both sides of the debate about how the global economy and outsourcing and manufacturing and unfair trade policies, how all that plays out, there is agreement on that.
DOBBS: And look at the candidates sitting in Michigan. Mitt Romney, Senator John McCain talking about he's the biggest free-trader in the country. Well glory be, how in the heck a man can sit there and say that he is going to bring change, as Senator McCain has, to Washington when he simply emulates the policies that have led Michigan and working men and women all over this country into these straits is, to me, inexplicable and inexcusable.
ROMANS: You have to hope that after Tuesday on Wednesday that around the country people are still talking about the problems in Michigan and what's causing them, Lou, so that other places where the manufacturing base is declining we don't see the same sort of fallout.
DOBBS: Well I can guarantee everybody watching this broadcast will be focusing on the people in Michigan long after that primary is over and the idiotic policies that have been pursued here. Thank you very much, Christine Romans.
