According to new census data, Rochester Hills has the highest median household income in the state. That’s great news for our community, but the household median wage for our state overall is 37^th in the nation, which is grim.

The median household income in Michigan is slightly over $72,000, compared to the U.S. median of about $84,000.

Michigan is no longer a wealthy state, and we haven’t been for a long time. There’s no nibbling around the edges that is going to lift us back to the top tier of states. We need a bold redesign.

Our state got wealthy in phases. First it was based on natural resources. At one point Michigan alone produced 25 percent of the nation’s lumber supply. (“Green gold.”) Our mineral wealth from mining led to heavy manufacturing because it made sense to make things close to where you got the raw minerals back when it was expensive to transport heavy things.

Then came the automobile. Michigan owned a globally transformative innovation for many decades. We built a mono-industry economy, and the state has been living off that legacy ever since. We got complacent.

Michigans’s population has been hovering around 10 million since the 1980s. As a result of that stagnation, our size has shrunk relative to other states. At our peak, Michigan had 19 seats in Congress. Today, we only have 13. That means we’ve also lost power in D.C.

So the question is – when will Michigan generate another globally transformative innovation to replace the loss of our dominance of the auto industry? How long will that take? What if it never happens?

Maybe we’ll get lucky and lightning will strike twice and Michigan will again dominate a global industry. But I wouldn’t count on it. We’ve tried to lure big companies here through massive corporate subsidies. It hasn’t worked.

So in the interim, we have to be attractive to a whole lot of smaller, innovative businesses. But how are we going to attract an entrepreneur to a cold state with high corporate income tax, high electricity costs, and poor performing schools? (We’re ranked 44^th in the nation for fourth grade literacy.) How are you going to attract an entrepreneur to Michigan with those kinds of metrics? How are you going to keep an entrepreneur?

The only thing we can do is make this the easiest state to open and run a business. To do that, we need a complete overhaul of our tax and regulatory environment.  

That’s the only way to replace the mono-industry economy that we enjoyed for decades but is now gone. We’ve tried attracting giants with all sorts of billions. We’ve given away about $20 billion thus far this century. And for that, we’ve got 9% of the promised jobs. Should we keep doing the same thing? No, it’s time for an overhaul. We should instead try to have 10,000 smaller, successful businesses.

Do we want to wait until we fall to 50^th? Or fall behind Puerto Rico? What are we waiting for?