Word: michiganisms
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Across the country, state governments are grappling with how to sharply trim budgets amid the worst recession in decades. But nowhere is that debate more intense than in Michigan, where officials are scrambling to close a $2.8 billion deficit and avert a government shutdown at midnight on Wednesday...
...last year, this state has endured the collapse of its core automotive industry and dozens of affiliated businesses. Now, Michigan's unemployment rate is 15.2%, the nation's highest. The state's tax revenues have plunged by more than 22%. And even leafy, seemingly upscale suburban neighborhoods have become hubs of foreclosed homes and shuttered businesses. (See pictures of Detroit's beautiful, horrible decline...
...Managing Michigan's crisis is the state's governor, Jennifer M. Granholm. Talking recently with TIME in the parlor of her second-floor office in the state's capitol building, Granholm said that preventing a government shutdown before midnight Wednesday, the end of the state's fiscal year, "is going to require a level of cuts that people have not had before...
...public services, from health care to libraries and prisons. The impact on the state could be dire. There are concerns that cuts to prisons and police departments, for example, will lead to an increase in crime. And one of the Granholm administration's chief goals - doubling the number of Michigan college graduates - could be derailed by plans to cut a program that awards up to $4,000 to any student who finishes two years of college...
Since assuming the governorship in 2003, Granholm has moved to broaden Michigan's industrial base into such areas as energy and robotic technology - an effort that aims to tap into the skills of the state's sizeable population of scientists and engineers. "For 100 years, we've been focused on the automobile," says Granholm. "So we have an identity crisis." (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...