Forbes columnist says ‘we’re all Michiganders now’

Reihan Salam makes a strained argument (you may disagree) in his Forbes magazine column today.

Salam’s We’re All Michiganders Now is not your standard Michigan-as-cautionary-tale stemming from the collapse of domestic manufacturing or even over-reliance on one too-big-to-fail industry. Instead, he argues that “high-end” states — states with governments that failed to plan properly for shrinking populations, for instance — have lost out to “low-end” ones in mostly sunny places like Arizona, Florida and Nevada, places that have been growing economically as Michigan has shrunk. Low taxes in those states appear to be central to Salam’s pitch, although that’s not entirely clear either.

There’s more than an echo of Richard Florida’s creative class theory at work here, which reads quite persuasively in a few places in the column.

But the kicker for Salam, a fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, is his argument for “climate controlled towns.”

I’m not kidding.

After totally dismissing a new clean energy economy as a potential game-changer,  Salam speculates that what the “frigid Upper Midwest” really needs is more pleasant year-round temperatures. Read it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

I’m picturing big glass bubbles over every Michigan city with a population over 10,000 people.