Toledo
Blade...
Columbus’ priorities
Ohio lawmakers are working out the small differences in the budget
bills passed by the state House and Senate. But the key themes of the
two-year budget that the General Assembly will approve and Gov. John
Kasich will sign by the end of the month are already distressingly
clear.
It’s a budget whose idea of “shared sacrifice” is slashing support of
essential public services on which middle and working-class and
low-income Ohio families rely, while giving preferential tax treatment
to the state’s wealthiest individuals and to corporations.
It’s a budget that defines “fiscal discipline” as eliminating the
state’s revenue shortfall largely by shifting the burden to local
communities and public schools — and probably requiring local tax hikes.
It’s a “jobs budget” that likely will cost many public-sector workers
their jobs, and at one point would have denied thousands of
private-sector workers their legal right to earn even the minimum wage.
It will trim support of public education while waving through an
unwarranted expansion of private-school vouchers and charters.
It seeks to transfer to private control many of the state’s most
valuable public assets — the turnpike, the lottery, the liquor
distribution system — as well as critical institutions such as prisons,
in exchange for small amounts of up-front money and with scant state
oversight. It’s a “reform-minded” budget that does too little to reform
the $7 billion the state doles out each year in tax breaks, many of
them wasteful sops to special interests.
Lawmakers also have used the budget process as an excuse to seek big
policy changes in such unrelated areas as restricting abortion rights,
without public hearings or adequate debate.
Leaders of the Kasich administration and the Republican majorities in
the legislature argue that Ohio voters knew what they were signing up
for when they handed the GOP control of state government at last
November’s election. But how many could have anticipated such a radical
transformation so quickly?
The originally projected $8 billion revenue gap in the next budget of
nearly $56 billion has narrowed a bit as the state’s economy has picked
up. The Senate budget includes slight improvements from the House
version in funding for children’s services, at-home elder care,
schools, and local government.
Even now, though, GOP officials demand that any new money go to
replenishing the state’s “rainy day” fund, instead of starting to
restore some of the programs the budget would gut. Do they expect the
state’s fiscal emergency to get even worse in the next few years? If
so, they might share the reasons for such forebodings with their
constituents.
There are things lawmakers could do to make the budget somewhat less
bad. They could drop their plan to repeal Ohio’s estate tax — a
proposal that penalizes local governments that rely on the tax, while
needlessly rewarding a handful of the state’s richest taxpayers.
They could postpone the final phase of the state’s income tax cut until
revenues improve. They could not just set up a committee to review tax
expenditures, but actually save more than $300 million a year right now
by ending unnecessary breaks identified by Ohio think tanks across the
ideological spectrum (see the op-ed column on the next page).
On the spending side, they could reduce the $1.4 billion annual hit
Ohio’s Medicaid program takes in smoking-related costs by investing $1
million to enforce the state’s voter-approved indoor smoking ban and
providing minimally adequate funding for tobacco prevention and
cessation programs. That could help save a lot of lives, too.
Will lawmakers do any of these things? Probably not. Will voters
remember what their elected officials in Columbus are doing to them?
Let’s hope so.
Read it at the Toledo Blade
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