When former Gov. Rick Snyder rolled out his "Marshall Plan for Talent" last year, there were more than a few Lansing observers who scoffed at the notion that a $100 million, five-year plan to fix Michigan's leaky talent pipeline could symbolically compare to the $12 billion the U.S. poured into rebuilding Europe after World War II.

Some journalists — myself included — stopped using the phrase "Marshall Plan" to describe the program because it seemed to stretch the historical definition of a Marshall Plan in terms of scope and focused public policy aimed at rebuilding something that's broken.

It was a scattershot set of grants aimed at fulfilling Snyder's agenda of promoting lifelong learning and the notion that workers should be constantly updating their skills. But it was not nearly as robust as the governor's office originally pitched to Amazon in a failed bid to lure the tech giant to Detroit.

In today's dollars, the original Marshall Plan would amount to $127 billion.

Snyder's "Marshall Plan for Talent" is literally funded with loose change from the state budget — leftover one-time money that is by no means guaranteed to be renewed by the Legislature beyond a year or two.

Michigan's new Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has not said whether she'll propose keeping the program in place when she presents her first budget to lawmakers on Tuesday.

But Whitmer has begun drumming up support for her own talent development plan that entails a two-pronged approach of making college more affordable and getting more working adults into training programs or college to complete degrees or in-demand certificates.

If her original estimates hold up, Whitmer's new programs will cost up to $100 million per year. Making the programs sustainable could be the challenge as the state's $10 billion general fund is hobbling along with less than 3 percent growth this century — it's running $3.8 billion under inflation since 2000 — and Whitmer is still on the hook for fixing those "damn roads."

The simmering budget fight in Lansing this spring may end up pitting education and talent development vs. filling potholes in the roads — and many other priorities for the governor and Republican-controlled Legislature.

For Michigan's business leaders clamoring for a robust across-the-board solution to the talent shortages beginning to plague your companies, here's a potential solution: Put some skin in the game.

No one wants to touch the 6 percent corporate income tax or meddle with who pays the CIT or runs their business profits through the 4.25 percent individual income tax.

But there's a tax code expenditure that could be sacrificed to solely fund talent development programs: Michigan Economic Growth Authority tax credits.

MEGA tax credits deplete the state's general fund revenue by about $600 million annually — and will continue to do so through the end of 2029. For comparison of the magnitude of $600 million on the state budget, the Legislature appropriated a combined $599.93 million to subsidize the operations of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Michigan State University this fiscal year.

Fewer than 50 companies in Michigan are still entitled to MEGA tax credits under the much-reviled Michigan Business Tax.

But they hold a $6 billion unfunded liability for Michigan taxpayers that's no different than the liability of underfunded pensions and retiree health care benefits for government workers.

And in the years following Snyder's 2011 tax cuts for businesses, the refundable MEGA tax credits have contributed to a major shift in the share of the state's taxes on businesses from about 13 percent two decades ago to 5 percent.

If the remaining companies holding MEGA tax credits — namely General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — were to agree to forfeit half of their tax credits for the next decade, it would produce about $300 million annually for 10 years that could be dedicated to talent development initiatives.

That $3 billion could be put to work in education and job-training programs that both carry forward Snyder's vision of more lifelong learning, while pursuing Whitmer's policy of achieving a goal of having 60 percent of adults with a college degree or credential by 2030.

A $3 billion, decade-long Marshall Plan for talent development would send a much clearer message to businesses globally about how serious Michigan is about replenishing the depleted human capital of its economy.

And it's a plan GM, Ford and FCA should sign on to — because their future depends on human capital. It also would be good politics in this age of populist outrage at corporations reaping record profits and paying little-to-no taxes.

These century-old companies that are the lifeblood of our economy in southeast Michigan will not survive in their current form if they don't become tech companies that also assemble automobiles. They'll become tier one suppliers of Apple, Google, Amazon or some other artificial intelligence startup that hasn't yet been created.

GM knows it. Why else would Detroit's hometown automaker plant its driverless car division, Cruise, in San Francisco? It's not because California has a middle-class income-tax rate that is more than double Michigan's rate of 4.25 percent. It's because the automaker that's been promised an untold sum of tax subsidies to stay headquartered in Michigan knows the talent needed to build the car of the future is not always near home.

Ford is taking a different path in pursuing Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr.'s vision of building a Silicon Valley of the Midwest in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. One looming question mark over Ford Motor's $740 million plan to remake Corktown and its derelict Michigan Central Station train depot is whether it can fill the jobs. Bill Ford essentially has gambled that the Dearborn automaker can overcome the in-state talent deficit by luring out-of-state minds to work in trendy offices originally built for an early 20th century train company overlooking Roosevelt Park.

Under the terms of its MEGA tax credits deal, Ford will get to collect a tax credit for that new arrival equal to the 4.25 percent in state income tax they pay on their earnings. Ford Motor also is getting $239 million in additional tax breaks over 35 years to plant 2,500 tech workers in Detroit instead of Dearborn, Ann Arbor or California.

When former Gov. Jennifer Granholm juiced the MEGA tax credits in 2009, the program changed from one that incentivized coming here to one that incentivized staying here. Granholm's job retention tax credits worked, keeping the Big Three anchored in Michigan after GM and FCA took federal bailouts and went through bankruptcy. A decade later, the automakers have expanded payrolls and reinvested billions of dollars in tech centers and assembly plants in Michigan — as witnessed by the $4.5 billion investment plan for five Southeast Michigan auto plants that FCA announced last week.

There's almost no arguing about the success of Granholm's gambit anymore. But should this tax subsidy remain on the books until 2029? What public policy purpose is it serving? And what good does it do if these companies don't have a highly skilled workforce that can help reinvent their business models? Or could those tax dollars be better spent on an investment in the human capital needed at GM, Ford, FCA, the other dozen foreign-owned automakers with a presence in Michigan and all of their thousands of suppliers spread across the state?

These are questions Whitmer and the Legislature should confront this year (before another divisive election year rolls around).

The truth is, the state's budgetary woes of the 2000s are just one recession away from returning. College scholarships like the ones Whitmer is proposing have a tendency to become the first to go in a budget crisis in Lansing (just ask Jennifer Granholm).

More importantly, Michigan is already behind in the so-called "war for talent."

Bill Ford knows it. That's why he's rolling the dice on Corktown. GM CEO Mary Barra knows it. That's why GM has set up shop in Silicon Valley.

Michigan needs a real Marshall Plan for talent development that can outlast Whitmer and the Legislature's time in office — and the next recession.

And it needs one fast.