Saying No to Michigan: I have lived all but a couple of the distressingly numerous years of my life in Michigan. I was born in Detroit, grew up in Southfield, and have spent pretty much my entire adult life in the greater Ann Arbor area. Needless to say, I like it here. I like Michigan a lot. And it gets better each year as global warming turns the winters into minor inconveniences.

If you look beyond decaying Detroit and its utterly indistinct suburbs (and ignore the lesser lost cause of Flint), Michigan is a real gem. The west, central and northern areas of the State are loaded with lakes and forests and ski slopes and golf courses and perfect little towns with main streets that just beg to be walked down to the ice cream parlor at dusk on a warm summer evening. Really, there are probably a thousand reasons that your family summer vacation would be better spent in Michigan than Orlando.

Now it's beginning to look like tourism may soon be the only industry of consequence in the future. By any realistic measure, Michigan is falling apart economically. Unemployment is consistently well above the national average -- close to double at times. We are at the bottom in revenue growth -- effective mired in near recession while the rest of the country practically booms. Population is dropping -- figure we lose about 40,000 people a year. Businesses are flying out of the state at an alarming rate -- longtime residents and big employers Comerica and Pfizer recently decamped.

All this fiscal pathos most glaringly reflects in the housing market: you're lucky if your investment in your house has merely remained stagnant over the past few years. I have friends who have sat on two mortgages because they got caught with a new house before closing on the old one. At first they didn't worry, figuring they might have to cover both payments only for a month or two. Now it's more than a year later and they are worried and they are not at all confident in breaking even after the extended time doubled up on mortgage interest.

Probably the most depressing development is that the current government in Lansing is talking about having to raise taxes to cover budget shortfalls. That is the first step toward utter destruction. Practically every economy that goes in the toilet has started down this path: Commerce is horrible, tax revenues drop, budget shortfalls require tax increases, tax increases scare even more businesses away, population drops, so tax revenue doesn't come despite the increased rates, there are more budget shortfalls, so taxes are increased... It's easy to see Michigan marching steadily down this path. I don't know where it all ends. A crisis of some sort perhaps, like New York City in the '70s (can we hire Rudy Guiliani?), or just an agonizing endless degradation, like Detroit.

But bad times are also opportunities. Real estate is cheap. Cost of living probably won't rise too much, if at all. Getting restaurant reservations is easy. Of course, all that is only good if it is eventually going to turn around and I'm really not confident that it will any time soon. As much as I have ragged on New Orleans of late for mismanaging its future, I can't say things are run any better up here. Like I said with respect to New Orleans, voters always get what they ask for, whether they want it or not. We have no one to blame but ourselves. I just hope we are smart enough not to let the raises-taxes/budget-shortfall spiral get started, or I may end up having to live out the remainder of my hopefully numerous years somewhere else.