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Reaction: Dayton Daily News...
Editorial: Kasich
needs to be bold and effective
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Photo: Cleveland Plain Dealer
There was no danger of the cameras catching anyone sleeping during Gov.
John Kasich’s first State of the State speech Tuesday, March 8.
What it lacked in polished oratory, it made up for with energy and
passion.
About the substance:
He was absolutely right that his first seven weeks in office — which,
he joked, may seem like seven years to some — have been dramatic.
His decision to outsource the department of development and give its
most high-profile work to a new quasi-private organization was vintage
Kasich — a rejection of the expected way of doing business. Whether
Jobs-Ohio, as the agency is known, will really deliver remains to be
seen.
The movement to upend Ohio’s 1983 collective bargaining bill has also
been stunning.
He and a Republican legislature are on the verge of ending tenure for
all new teachers; prohibiting governments from offering “step” raises
to public employees and instead instituting merit pay; and eliminating
binding arbitration for police and firefighters. These are dramatic
reforms.
Democratic governors before him would have been philosophically opposed
to the changes, while the Republican governors Ohio has known recently
would not have been eager to embrace the inevitable fight that is
playing out.
Gov. Kasich’s willingness to tell the nursing home industry that it
needs a new business model, that Ohio is going to quickly expand
in-home care for the elderly regardless of what that does to the
industry’s bottom line, is just good public policy. Medicaid nursing
home costs are consuming Ohio’s budget.
In what may be his “Nixon goes to China moment,” Gov. Kasich forcefully
said Ohio has to stop locking up low-level offenders, and that instead
it should use in-home detention, probation, halfway houses and other
alternatives to prisons.
Traditionally, this has not been a Republican view. Noting that 47
percent of prisoners are serving sentences of less than a year, he
argues that many of them can be punished in less costly settings.
Gov. Kasich adamantly restated he will not raise taxes, even as he said
that Ohio can’t cut its way to prosperity. There’s tension between
those views. How they play out will be more apparent when he releases
his budget.
(Of course, the governor also knows that much of the budget cutting
that the state is going to do will ultimately trickle down to local
governments and schools. If they want to make a case for raising taxes,
well, at least that’s not on him.)
Gov. Kasich leads his audiences to believe that Ohio has suffered
economically mainly because of its tax climate. He repeated his
contention again Tuesday that Ohio is one of the highest-taxed states.
In fact, the reality is more complicated.
When Ohio was a manufacturing powerhouse, it didn’t have to have high
taxes because there were so many factories employing so many people. As
manufacturing declined, so did Ohio, and tax rates did go up.
But even if Ohio had been a certifiably low-tax state — today it falls
in the middle when local and state taxes are added together — that
wouldn’t have cushioned the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing
jobs that went overseas or are now being done by machines.
Taxes alone, in other words, do not explain Ohio’s troubles. Was the
state too slow to diversify? Has it been slow to get more people to
college? Should it have seen the world changing? Yes, yes and yes.
But closing all those auto, glass, tire and other factories was going
to overwhelm the state no matter what.
The governor talked a lot about “restructuring” as the smart approach
to making do with less. It’s a way of doing business that the private
sector has had to adopt, and, in truth, it’s something governments have
also been doing — though not always with the urgency of people who have
to make a profit.
Gov. Kasich is showing a boldness that the times demand. What’s not
clear yet is whether he can combine that instinct with a willingness to
recognize where his ideas come up short and to adjust.
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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