As far as the 148-member Michigan Legislature and one beleaguered governor are concerned, the point of budget deliberations, arguments and competing plans is all business, all jobs, all the time: what taxes businesses should pay, what policies encourage job creation, how best to attract investment, etc.

But if they really want to talk about Michigan’s future, they have to talk more about Michigan’s children.

What if all of the budget discussions in Lansing began with: What is best for children? What if the state created a Children First Budget that, by its very nature, would eliminate all the other money the state has to spend on people later in life because they were shortchanged as children?

The damage starts early

Michigan has public schools that are graduating children who are unable to read, unable to attend college and unable to work. It will spend millions of dollars for decades taking care of those children, because they will not be the ones beating a path to the state border to find nicer, warmer, more progressive places to live.

Of Michigan’s 1.6 million Medicaid enrollees, 950,000 are children. The state and its nonprofit hospitals care for a disproportionate number of patients they would not have if the state had an insurance system that allowed residents to practice prevention instead of cope with crisis. The state Medicaid budget is $8 billion, but only about a fifth of that is spent on those children.

What if our state legislators decided to stop throwing around plans branded with elephants and asses and, instead, sat down together and built one, single budget from the ground up, starting with children?

Students in the balance

Officials have talked about privatizing everything from universities to prisons. But what would work — restructuring government to fit our future instead of our past — doesn’t happen. The most radical thing the Legislature could do is to ask the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or some other education-interested savior, to help Michigan create schools that work, teach a 21st-Century curriculum and put children on a level playing field from the time they’re 5. Those children, treated like future leaders and CEOs and scientists, would be less likely to need Medicaid because they would be less likely to be out of a job or to have children at 13 or to be in jail by 17.

But folks in Lansing seem to always want the moms and children to sink with the ship — cutting health and education services first.

In North Carolina, a state that cares about its children, Gov. Mike Easley has signed a state spending plan that included 8% raises for public school teachers and 6% for university and community college staffs, hired 100 middle-school literacy coaches, and provided $95 million to improve mental health treatment in community settings.

Maybe if the folks in Lansing build the budget Children First, and stop acting like children, it would not only be balanced, but all done before June 1, when cuts in education and Medicaid kick in — and kick children, again.

Paid for by the Mike Easley Committee