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Columbus Dispatch...
Budget
remarkable; hurdles remain
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Gov.
John Kasich’s $55.8 billion state
budget - which the General Assembly sent him Wednesday - is:
•
Remarkably good, to the governor’s
fellow Republicans.
•
Remarkably bad, to Statehouse
Democrats, especially those elected from city districts.
•
Just plain remarkable, compared with
typical Ohio budgets. Until now, every two years, when Ohio wrote
budgets, it’s
been “same old, same old.” But “same old, same old” - a tweak here, a
tweak
there - got Ohio into the fix it’s in.
In
that context, consider this comment
from Ohio Consumers for Health Coverage, a coalition that includes,
among
others, the Ohio Council of Churches, the Legal Aid Society of
Southwest Ohio,
Ohio’s unit of the National Alliance on Mental Illness - and AFSCME
Council 8,
the Service Employees International Union and Ohio’s unit of the
Universal
Health Care Action Network:
“While
not perfect, (the budget)
contains bold changes to health-care delivery and payment - changes
that not
only will improve health care for Medicaid enrollees but will improve
health
care for all Ohioans.” Translation: Kasich took on Ohio’s
budget-busting
nursing-home lobby and, unlike any previous Ohio governor, won.
Perhaps,
as House Minority Leader
Armond Budish, a Beachwood Democrat, charged, “Governor Kasich has
exploited a
crisis to impose a radical political agenda on Ohioans.” Maybe, but
three other
facts should be on the table.
One,
Kasich’s agenda, however labeled,
got him elected. Two, wasn’t it Barack Obama’s sidekick, Chicago Mayor
Rahm
Emanuel, who said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”?
Three, the
mere fact that Kasich has an agenda is fairly remarkable in a state
where deals
trump ideals.
But
Kasich is not the only one who has
an agenda. So does Republican House Speaker William G. Batchelder, a
Medina
conservative first elected to the House in 1968. Batchelder has been
waiting 40
years to see if the first Bob Taft’s ideas, “Mr. Republican’s” ideas,
updated
then fairly tried, can leave Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
liberalism
in the dust. If so, that might make Ohio - to freshen John Winthrop’s
and
Ronald Reagan’s formula for civic virtue - a shining suburb on a hill.
Budish
and other Democrats are correct
in saying that while the Kasich budget holds the line on statewide
taxes, it
cuts state aid to cities, villages and school districts. That may force
local
tax increases, especially on homeowners. That is, Kasich and Republican
legislators are downstreaming tax increases onto mayors and councils
and school
boards. (Kasich wants local governments to try thrift first.) One
pro-taxpayer
angle: Local voters have much more control over local taxes (by levy
elections
and the like) than over statewide taxes.
The
risk for the GOP is that Democrats
may roll back Senate Bill 5, Kasich’s anti-public-employee-union law,
this
November. That’s Hurdle Two for Kasich. (The Budget was Hurdle One;
financially, it assumes Senate Bill 5 will survive.)
Hurdle
Three: Still on Kasich’s to-do
list is to re-work the way state government aids
kindergarten-through-12th-grade schools in Ohio. A reasonable plan by
then-Gov.
Ted Strickland, the Democrat Kasich unseated last year, has been thrown
overboard by Republicans. In effect, the new Kasich budget is a
temporary fix,
or bridge, until the governor and his policy team fashion and then
unveil a new
school-funding approach.
About
the only good bet is that any
Kasich plan would offer Ohio parents even more school choice than they
have
now. Batchelder is the father of school choice in Ohio. He is also, as
the
budget shows, Kasich’s policy partner.
Read
it at the Columbus Dispatch
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