Despite an unexpected budget surplus for this fiscal year, Michigan may drastically underfund its School Aid Fund, which is the primary source of dollars for K-12 school districts that educate nearly 1.7 million students.

Last year, the School Aid Fund ran a surplus (much like the overall budget for this year). However, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder siphoned off the School Aid Fund’s money “to plug a shortfall in the state’s General Fund.” To assuage infuriated educators, he agreed to a one-time payment of $200 per student, $100 of which was only received if the district adopted “financial best practices” — including school employees paying at least 10 percent of their health insurance premiums.

But now Republicans say that one-time payment is up, and K-12 schools will not have enough money to make up for the loss come next year. Why? As the Kalamazoo Gazette reports, while Republicans were gutting the School Aid Fund, they also passed a $1.6 billion tax cut for businesses that is costing schools $700 million per year, or $500 per student:

New revenues will offset about $1.3 billion of the $1.6 billion business tax cut, said David Zin, an economist for the Senate Fiscal Agency.

But almost all revenues are going into the state’s General Fund rather than the School Aid Fund, which is losing more than $700 million a year from the business tax cut.

In short, while the General Fund gets new revenues to replace money lost from the tax cut, the School Aid Fund does not.

Thus, the School Aid Fund will see its lowest revenues since 1994, according to the state Senate Fiscal Agency. Kalamazoo Public Schools superintendent Michael Rice said that the decrease in funding means “school districts have seen their revenues eroded by about one-sixth since 2005, when taking inflation into account.” “It’s not simply that the School Aid Fund is at its lowest level,” he added. “It’s also that $1 given to us today buys one-sixth less that it did five years ago.”

Of course, prioritizing the wealthy over working Michiganders is nothing new for Snyder and his colleagues. While enacting $1.7 billion in tax cuts for corporations last year, Snyder also “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” ended the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes, and cut aid for 11,000 families and nearly 30,000 children.

Surveying this field of foregone responsibility, Mattawan Public School Superintendent Patrick Bird said Republicans “[have] given a huge tax break to corporations, but where are they taking those dollars from?”

Last year, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed into law a drastic expansion of the state’s emergency manager law, which imposes what critics have dubbed “financial martial law” on local governments the state deems to be mismanaging finances. The emergency managers, who are appointed without input from local communities, have the power to effectively depose elected officials, break collective bargaining agreements, and unilaterally dictate decisions about city operations, finances, infrastructure, and public safety.

Today, the Flint Journal points out that the managers receive six-figure salaries, set by the state and paid for by the local communities, which are all cash-strapped (or else they wouldn’t be subject to emergency managers in the first place). In Flint, in fact, the manager earns more than the mayor earns:

By law, the pay of Michigan’s five emergency managers — ranging from $132,000 to $250,000 — is set by the state, but the money actually is paid by the local communities they’re in charge of. [...]

Mayor Dayne Walling’s was Flint’s highest-paid elected official, receiving $91,800 before [Flint emergency manager Michael] Brown eliminated his pay and benefits and those of city council members.

Brown on Tuesday partially restored Walling’s pay to $55,000 and council members each will receive $7,000 a year.

The Journal points out that law has dictated that local communities pay the salaries of emergency managers since 1990, but Snyder’s expansion of the law means that many more communities have become subject to it than ever before. Activists are working to repeal the law via referendum of through a court ruling.

In the last few weeks of 2011, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) rounded out his concerted campaign against Michigan workers with a few final laws. In a prejudicial move against the LGBT community, Snyder signed a measure prohibiting all public employees from providing benefits for their unmarried partners. In considering his state’s 10.6 percent unemployment rate, Snyder also signed a law forcing some of Michigan’s over 400,000 unemployed workers to take low-wage jobs after 10 weeks of benefits, even if those jobs pay less than they were making before:

The measures require some unemployed workers to take new jobs after 10 weeks of benefits even if the available work is outside their previous experience or pays lower wages than they were making before. They also make it harder for someone to collect jobless benefits if they’re fired for cause or leave a job voluntarily.[...]

Snyder disagreed with critics who say requiring jobless workers to take a job paying 120 percent of their weekly benefit could trap them in a low-wage position by leaving them little time to look for work in their area of expertise.

“It’s to encourage people to work. It’s not to have them go backward,” Snyder said of the legislation. “It’s easiest to find a job when you’ve gotten a job.”

This new requirement comes in addition to Snyder’s decision to cut the availability of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 20 weeks starting in 2012. The measure also encapsulates Snyder’s priorities over his first year in office — placing the burden on the most vulnerable for the sake of the state’s bottom line. In 2011, he “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” proposed ending the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, cut funding for school districts by eight to ten percent, cut aid for 11,000 low-income families and nearly 30,000 children, and enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes — all in the name of the deficit.

Naturally, not all Michiganders were asked to share in such sacrifices — namely, corporations. While more than 1.5 million of his constituents faced poverty, Snyder enacted a $1.7 billion tax cut for corporations, or about “$30 in corporate tax cuts for every dollar saved in welfare benefit cuts.” Indeed, Snyder pushed to cut the state’s business taxes by nearly $2 billion, or 86 percent.

In enacting such preferential treatment for those who need it least, Snyder did earn an impressive recognition in 2011. For his first year in office, Snyder ranked as one of the most unpopular governors in the country.