LANSING – After a decade of economic pummeling, Michigan has enjoyed some strong rebounds in the last year, a report on the state’s overall budget from the Senate Fiscal Agency said, but the recent growth does not overcome some ongoing fiscal weakness.

The report also said that the 2012-13 budget proposed by Governor Rick Snyder would continue a long-term trend of reducing the number of state workers. In fact, the report said cuts in overall government employment, by both state and local governments, exceeded on a percentage basis the cuts in governmental employment made nationally.

And the budget would also continue what has been a growing trend of the state seeing an increasing percentage of the revenue for the overall budget coming from federal funding.

The report said, for example, that while both general fund and School Aid Fund revenues have increased in the last year, when adjusted for inflation they both are less then the amounts collected initially.

For example, the general fund is expected to raise slightly more than $9 billion in the 2011-12 fiscal year, which is an increase of 2.5 percent from the 2010-11 fiscal year. But when adjusted for inflation it is less than the amount raised in the 1967-68 fiscal year, the first year of the Michigan income tax. On inflationary basis, the general fund raised more than $10 billion in 1967-68.

Meanwhile, the nearly $10.8 billion the School Aid Fund will raise in 2011-12, an expected drop of 4.3 percent from the year before, is, when adjusted for inflation, less than what the fund raised when it was created in 1994 as part of the Proposal A school financing changes. On an inflationary basis, in 1994 it raised nearly $12 billion.

The report also said that in 2011 Michigan personal income growth was 3.3 percent, which was more than the 3.2 percent in national personal income growth. That marked the first time in a decade the state had seen its average personal income growth beat the national average. The report said personal income grew in Michigan an average of 17 percent from 2000 to 2010, while nationally it grew by 44 percent.

The report also said there were nearly 1,300 fewer state employees in the 2011-12 fiscal year, at 54,830, than in the 2010-11 fiscal year.

And Mr. Snyder had proposed a further reduction, in his proposed 2012-13 budget, of another 1,651 positions. That would put the state’s total workforce at 53,179, the report said, if enacted.

The report also said that the nearly $19.7 billion in federal funding in the 2011-12 budget amount to 41.3 percent of the total resources in the budget. In the 2010-11 budget, the $19.2 billion in federal funds amounted to 39.8 percent of total resources in the budget.

In the 2001-02 budget, the $11.2 billion in federal funds amounted to 29 percent of all the resources in that year’s budget, the report said.

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