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The
Columbus Dispatch
Joe Hallett
commentary: How much pain? We’ll know soon
Sunday, March 6, 2011 02:58 AM
By Joe Hallett
Julius Caesar met his demise on the Ides of March, and now, 2,055 years
later, that date has an ominous appointment with Ohio.
On March 15, Gov. John Kasich will unveil his two-year budget,
beginning an era in which virtually every Ohio resident and entity -
corporations and small businesses, hospitals and nursing homes,
universities and local schools, counties and cities and townships -
will have to get along with less.
Not since Dec. 10, 1971, when the state’s income tax was enacted and
began fueling what is now an unsustainable government, has a single day
portended a more profound change in how state government relates to its
citizens.
The Ides of March is when we will learn how Kasich plans to fill an
$8billion hole in the budget without raising taxes, which programs and
services he will cut, which fees he will raise, what assets he will
sell or lease (the Ohio Turnpike?), which departments he will privatize
(prisons?), and what agencies he will consolidate or eliminate.
His budget, Kasich told me, will represent “one of the most significant
reform agendas ever seen in the state’s history.”
The times have destined Kasich to become one of Ohio’s most
consequential governors. In his first 50 days, he has wrought
transformational change. He has privatized the job-creating functions
of the Ohio Department of Development and signed a law to ease
regulations on businesses and the environment.
He is on the threshold of enacting Senate Bill 5, a law to curtail
public-employee collective-bargaining rights, and of legislative
victories to stabilize public-employee pension funds and eliminate the
estate tax. With hefty Republican majorities in the House and Senate,
Kasich is quickly codifying an agenda that national conservatives have
thirsted for ever since Ronald Reagan made government Public Enemy No.
1.
“For Kasich, I think it is clear that he views government as part of
the problem, not the solution to our current problems,” said Mark Caleb
Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville
University. “The fascinating political question, I think, is whether or
not voters will support this agenda once they begin to come to grips
with it.”
Kasich seems unconcerned by that question. From his first day as a
gubernatorial candidate, he has said he will do what he must to fix the
state and not worry about the political consequences.
“He’s already been the most dynamic governor I’ve seen in 25 years,”
said Roger Geiger, vice president of the National Federation of
Independent Business in Ohio. “He’s on the cusp of doing some pretty
amazing things in very short order.”
There is, of course, an opposite viewpoint, expressed passionately by
the thousands of public employees and their supporters who protested
Senate Bill 5 at Statehouse rallies during the past two weeks. Many
believe that solving the budget crisis by gutting services is
counterproductive, that the way to ensure a better-educated, healthier
and safer citizenry is to invest taxes in its well-being.
Make no mistake: State government isn’t in dire straits simply because
of the recession and the three-decade decline of Ohio’s manufacturing
sector. The $8 billion deficit is, in part, self-inflicted. Former
Republican Gov. Bob Taft and GOP lawmakers, later supported by
Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, purposely cut the state income tax 21
percent over five years.
Did you notice the tax cut? State government certainly felt it, now
operating on $2 billion a year less than in 2005. With that money,
Kasich would be looking at $4 billion in cuts rather than $8 billion
over the biennium.
“The obvious promise of the tax cut was to generate jobs, and I think
the evidence shows that it hasn’t happened,” said Zach Schiller,
research director for Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland-based think tank.
Since the income-tax cut was approved in June 2005, Ohio’s share of the
nation’s jobs has shrunk from 4.06 percent to 3.87 percent.
Ironically, that woeful indicator of economic stress bespeaks a new
reality: Ohioans cannot afford the state and local government they
have. A reformation is in order. Kasich simply must chart a different
course.
It will be painful. Beware the Ides of March.
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
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