In the most recent edition of the Michigan Education Association's online magazine, a retired Michigan teacher made a claim intended to portray how poorly teachers were paid years ago.

The October issue of the MEA’s “Voice Magazine” said this:

“Penny Letts remembers. The former middle school math teacher from Huron County’s Harbor Beach started her career 49 years ago making $6,000 a year, ‘and my friends were graduating from college with engineering degrees, making $22,000. They thought I was pretty stupid.’”

ForTheRecord says: It’s very likely that Letts is misremembering events from so long ago. When adjusted for inflation, a $22,000 salary in 1966 would be $164,000 in 2016 dollars.

Government data suggests that the idea that 1966 college graduates took entry level jobs in any profession at a starting salary of $164,000 in 2016 dollars is highly implausible.

According to the U.S. Census, the median income in 1965 for families in the U.S. was $6,900. Just 7 percent of the nation’s families made $15,000 or more that year.

And while entry-level engineers coming out of college have among the highest-paying starting salaries, they don’t come near $164,000 a year.

According to Michigan Tech University, the median entry-level salary for engineers in 2016 ranged from $55,880 in environmental engineering to $68,510 for software developers.

While Letts can’t be blamed for not remembering something correctly from nearly 50 years ago, the MEA certainly should have questioned the teacher’s recollections before publishing them.

That they failed to do so is part of a persistent MEA pattern.

In 2010-11, the last year of Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s second and final term, the state of Michigan approved 72 economic development deals with companies in what appears to have been a binge of corporate welfare handouts.

Some $2.4 billion dollars were promised to companies in 2011 under a since-discontinued program called the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA). Most of that went to a pair of car companies — $1.36 billion to Chrysler and $909 million to Ford.

No longer were politicians claiming to grow or transform the economy: These were so-called job “retention” deals, with the state paying companies for up to 20 years to maintain their state workforce numbers.

The MEGA program was discontinued in 2011, but the financial impact of its corporate welfare deals will fall on state budgets for decades. While the actual numbers are kept secret, much or most of the “credits” are simply checks written by the Michigan Treasury Department to the companies with the deals.

A recent report from the Senate Fiscal Agency states that Michigan taxpayers are still on the hook for these deals until at least 2032, at a cost of $7.6 billion. The agency estimates the payments represent a 4 percent to 5 percent annual hit to the state budget over that period.

Last year the state paid out $654.8 million under these MEGA deals. And from 2017 to 2032, the estimate is that future legislatures will have to budget more than a half billion dollars every year until at least 2028 and pay out a total of $7.6 billion through 2032.