Remembering Nick Gilbert’s inspiring life

Six years ago, when Nick Gilbert was a business student at Michigan State University, Crain’s Detroit Business’ then-Publisher and Editor Ron Fournier interviewed him for a pro le of the young man and his father, Dan.

What emerged was the portrait of a courageous 20-year-old who embraced life to the fullest despite battling a nerve disorder that left him legally blind.

“You live the life you’re given,” Nick Gilbert said at the time. “ at’s just the attitude I was born with. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

It was an attitude clearly shaped by his father, Detroit billionaire business titan Dan Gilbert, who told Fournier he wanted to help his son make sense of his rare condition, saying, “You drew a card, and it was just an unlucky card. You can’t really have a say in the cards you get. You just get a say in how you play them.”

Nick Gilbert died May 6 at the age of 26. By all accounts, he played his cards with resilience, optimism, persistence and passion.

To hear his family and friends share stories at the funeral, which was carried via livestream, Nick Gilbert’s life was one well-lived, despite its challenges and abbreviated span. And it carried lessons many of us could learn from.

Nick Gilbert had a lifelong battle with neuro bromatosis, a nerve disorder that causes tumors to grow anywhere in the body. For Nick, those tumors grew on his brain and left him nearly blind. At age 10, he required emergency brain surgery. By age 20, he’d been on and o chemotherapy for about 15 years.

Yet, Nick never complained or felt sorry for himself or asked, like so many us might, “Why me?” instead, he kept pushing forward and did so with humor, compassion and kindness.

“Although Nick had many obstacles, he was able to look at his life in its entirety, not identifying or naming each moment as good or bad, but accepting his reality while considering it in the grand scheme of things,” his mother, Jennifer Gilbert, said at his funeral. “He understood and appreciated his blessings and chose to focus on the silver lining in any situation, rather than on the challenge.”

She added, moments later, “Nick lived and loved fearlessly and unapologetically, wanting to experience everything the world had to o er and embraced every simple moment as if it was his last.” e state has had the fth-worst recovery from the pandemic, and we are still down 101,400 jobs from where we were before Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lockdowns. e state’s population loss is the eighth-highest in the nation. e elimination of the state’s right-to-work law in March allows unions to take their own members for granted and hurts state growth. Residents will say goodbye to the boost the law has given to manufacturing, population growth, and labor force participation.

Sure, his family is fabulously wealthy, with Dan Gilbert chairing Rocket Companies Inc., owning an NBA basketball team and redeveloping large swaths of downtown Detroit. He is perhaps Detroit’s single most important business leader of our time. Yet, as Henry Ford learned when he lost his grown son, Edsel, to cancer 80 years ago, money can’t buy everything.

It can, however, help fund research and, thanks to the millions the Gilbert family has donated, and the awareness Nick’s story has raised, we can all hope that one day there can be a cure for NF1, as one form of neuro bromatosis is known. at would be an incredible legacy, alongside Nick’s bravery, passion and resilience.

Donations in Nick’s memory may be made to NF Forward, 1074 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI 48226, or at n orwarddetroit.org.

Michigan’s economy has fallen behind, and state policymakers have made it worse. But there is a small change they could make to business taxation that would help improve economic competitiveness.

Look not to Lansing for leadership out of these trends. “We’re trying to make Michigan a place where every business can thrive,” Whitmer told a fawning Daily Show interviewer recently. But the new Democratic trifecta’s priorities have been consistently unfriendly to growth.

Lawmakers also re-imposed prevailing wage practices that require taxpayers to pay more for government construction regardless of quality. is is good for construction unions but ensures that people don’t get the best deal for their money. Infrastructure is vital to improving economic competitiveness, and the poor condition of Michigan’s is holding the state back.

Whitmer even ghts to water down the few recent improvements in policy.

After failing to prevent a modest automatic reduction of the state income tax rate, Whitmer refuses to update state withholding tables to let people keep more of what they earn. She also argues that the tax-cut trigger created by a 2015 law is temporary, a faulty interpretation of the statute that will mitigate the broader economic bene ts of cutting taxes. Businesses invest when they can make more money over the long term, so telling

In lieu of improvements to the state business climate, policymakers’ approach to growth is to subsidize select businesses at the public’s expense. ey’ve already authorized $2.9 billion in new business subsidies so far this year. e state could a ord to get rid of its entire corporate income tax for more than a year for that much.

Corporate welfare is the wrong way to improve an economy. Select subsidies are ineffective at creating jobs, unfair to the businesses that don’t get them, and expensive to the state budget. Although headlines about these subsidies give the impression that Michigan is adding jobs, the results of selective business subsidy programs indicate that handing out favors to selected corporations does not grow state economies. e economic policies that work improve the state for everyone.

Here is one policy that lawmakers ought to consider. It’s a change in a corporate income tax rule that hinders growth, and it can be changed without costing the state government money over the long term.

Corporate income taxes are assessed on pro t, or the di erence between a company’s revenues and expenses. is means the state has to make rules to de ne expenses. Current Michigan rules discourage business growth by not giving the same tax treatment to long-term investment that they do to current spending. at is, if a business spends money on advertising, it gets a full tax advantage and write o of the expense. But if a business spends money on a new o ce, it has to defer that expense over the useful life of the asset. It’s good accounting, but it’s bad tax policy and can be changed.

Some lawmakers may be hesitant to make this change because, although it would not reduce tax hauls over time, it would lead to a short-term loss of cash to the state treasury. e state has to let the business recognize the cost of long-term assets eventually, however, so the state collects just as much cash over the long term. To the extent that this encourages more business development, the state comes out ahead in tax collections, too. It’s a win-win that elected o cials ought to look at.

Indeed, too much policy entails picking winners and losers, through selective business subsidies and other policies. Michigan has better options.