Interesting tax reform plan coming out of Ohio from Governor John Kasich:
The plan’s centerpiece is a 20% cut over three years in all of the state’s nine income tax rates. The top rate would fall to 4.725% from 5.925%. Ohio allows its cities to impose add-on income taxes, so the current rate in cities like Cleveland can reach 8.4%.
The plan would also provide an income-tax deduction on half of all small business and Subchapter S income up to $750,000.
As it happens, this Wall Street Journal article discussing Ohio’s (among other states’) credit upgrade by Standard & Poor – and Ohio’s fairly dramatic drop in unemployment in a year – came out the same day that I spoke with Governor Kasich about his budget and labor union reform successes. The latter (SB5, which was in many ways an even stronger reform package than Wisconsin’s) is up for ratification again by the voters, in the form of Issue 2; needless to say, the Democrats are particularly desperate to reverse it, pretty much for the exclusive benefit of their Big Labor cronies. The need to keep reform alive in Ohio was thus prominent in the below interview:
The primary pro-Issue 2 website (“Building a Better Ohio”) can be found here. I encourage folks to check it out.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
Gov. Kasich is, of course, one of the freshmen Republican governors that took over large swathes of the Midwest last election cycle. We discussed both union reform (in the form of SB 5) and the upcoming budget battle – including about why both are so necessary for Ohio.
The Midwest is probably the most interesting region of the country right now, from a political science point of view: there are a lot of things being tried out in the social laboratories which are the individual states. It’s best that people pay as much attention as possible to what’s going on out there.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
…and the technical term for what it promises to be is “doozy.” There’s an $8,000,000,000 hole in the budget that needs to be filled (Ohio requires balanced budgets), and despite polling suggesting that Kasich could get away with raising taxes to fill it the Governor apparently won’t. It’s expected that the budget will cover the gap by privatization programs (including selling some prisons), leasing out state highways, large budget cuts across the board, and projected revenue increases. This is not going to be popular – according to the above poll, Kasich is already at 40% – but, as the Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register bluntly puts it, “The money has run out.”
I know that some Democratic politicians (and their sycophants, particularly their New Media ones) are licking their chops at the idea of watching their political opposite numbers do unpopular things to fix the economy. Not to ruin their mornings – oh, this is a lie; this is totally about ruining their mornings – but said politicians and sycophants may wish to consider the larger implications of recent elections. Put bluntly: the country has put in power on the state level a lot of people who do not care if they are loved for their actions. These people have internalized two lessons (one from the Democrats, and one from the Republicans):
Continue reading John Kasich’s (R) Ohio budget unveiled today… [UPDATED]
…on public sector unions. Gov. Kasich is unamused at the notion that it’s somehow unacceptable to even note that public employees are getting great deals on healthcare at taxpayer expense – and by great deals I mean ‘Ohio public sector employees are paying between one half and three-quarters what Ohio private sector employees pay:’
The 9%/23% number there*, by the way, is one of the better ratios out there for private sector employees. And by ‘better’ I mean ‘better for the tax payers.’ To give an idea: one large part of the sturm und drang being witnessed in Wisconsin right now is over public sector employees having been told that they will be expected to double their contributions to their own health care plans from 6% to 12% – which is half the Ohio number (or, for that matter, the Wisconsin number of 20%-23%), and even worse when you look at national ones. I understand that people are upset that their unsustainable sweetheart deals are about to go belly-up. I do, truly. But they are sweetheart deals, and they are unsustainable, and the country can no longer afford to ignore the fact that government employee unions have been raiding the public treasury in exchange for tawdry partisan political patronage. So as a practical matter the subject’s kind of closed. Continue reading Gov. Kasich (R, OH) Chews iron, spits nails…
(H/T: Third Base Politics) Do you know this guy?
Because he went after a Iraq War veteran at a Ted Strickland rally. Dumped hot coffee on him, then came back later to give said veteran the finger (in case you were wondering whether it was deliberate or not).
The cops would like to discuss the matter with the assailant, so if you know him, please contact the Scioto County Sheriff’s Office. Or you could just call the (current) Governor: the way that Ohio Democrats have been behaving lately, that was probably Strickland’s campaign manager.
Moe Lane (Crosspost)
For those so interested; it’ll be on tonight at 8 PM EST. The live video feed should be available via this link; if not, check here. I spoke with the John Kasich campaign today: they fully expect Strickland to keep playing the anti-NAFTA card while steadfastly ignoring the fact that Strickland is heavily dependent on Bill Clinton (the Big NAFTA Dog himself) to somehow save him from his current slow-motion defeat. They also expect John to consume Ted Strickland’s liver raw on national television, although they didn’t exactly put it in quite those terms.
Or anything really like those terms at all, really.
OK, they were just feeling confident about how the debate was going to go. I suppose that talking about eating livers raw and stuff would probably get too many complaints from the FDA.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
The unusual thing about this article (“Losing the Class War“) is not its message. Its message is in fact pretty straightforward: to wit, that the Democratic nominees for Senator and Governor in Ohio are both trying, and failing, to rouse public anger against the Republican nominees through some good, old-fashioned pseudo-populist demagoguery. They’re trying this because both Gov. Strickland (who is losing his re-election bid to John Kasich) and Lt. Gov. Fisher (who is losing the Senate race to Rob Portman) are heavily reliant on Big Labor to generate some sort of buzz for their moribund campaigns; and they’re failing because under their watch Ohio’s economy has, well, tanked. More to the point, the population of Ohio is aware that the current leadership team of Ohio consists of two gibbering, would-be rabble-rousers who apparently have, as they say, Poor Impulse Control. So, again, that’s not the unusual thing of that article.
No, the unusual thing is that it was on NPR: there’s some sort of partnership thing going on there with National Review Online. I guess somebody over at NPR can put two and two together, and get Armageddon…
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Who is Meghan Cofield? Well, she’s a Ohio worker who lost her job, and it’s all John Kasich’s fault!
No, wait, it was all John McCain’s fault!
Yeah. That was an ad from 2008 – same person, and even some of the same footage – when Barack Obama was pretending to be hating on NAFTA (needless to say, that promise came with an expiration date: also needless to say, Strickland has no intention of bringing that up with the President). Which leads me to the next question: just why is Meghan Cofield so depressed? She seems to be developing quite the career race-baiting the Chinese.
Moe Lane Continue reading Well, at least Meghan Cofield’s getting work.
Not that they noted that, really. But there’s still been some erosion of Strickland’s support in the last several months, whether PPP’s explicit about it or not:
43% of Ohio voters approve of how Strickland is doing his job as Governor, while 42%
disapprove. A January PPP survey found the numbers at 48/35.Strickland’s approval among Democrats has dropped from 70% to 62%, an unusually low
level of support for a Governor within his own party. He’s also seen an increasing level
of dissatisfaction with him from Republican voters, 72% of whom now say they
disapprove of what he’s doing after just 59% did earlier this year.Matched up against likely GOP candidate John Kasich, Strickland leads 44-42. He had a
slightly wider 45-39 advantage in January. Strickland is mostly hurt by a 54-33 deficit to
Kasich among independent voters, even though those same voters prefer a Democrat for
the Senate in numbers that PPP will release on Tuesday.
See Third Base Politics for more analysis (and Ohio Politics Online, on general principles). What I want to see is the next Quinnipac poll; both the March and the May ones were done back when there was an expectation that DeWine would be running for Governor. It’ll be interesting to see if the twenty point lead shown in both has dropped in the last two months, too.
In the meantime… as I said yesterday: Go Kasich.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
