The silly season is on; the election campaign has begun for 2010.
One of the first comments is by a candidate for the Ohio Senate who promotes one of those bumper sticker solutions, “Strong schools and lower taxes.” That sounds like an oxymoron; how can you have both? The sad thing is this candidate is a retired school teacher who should have a real-world view of education and the result of politicians tinkering with it, like No Child Left Behind (which was more like “All Children Left Behind”) and the other brilliant idea, proficiency tests.
The other bumper sticker saying is, “They will fight in Columbus to bring jobs to Ohio.” My thought on this very tired statement is simple: can we watch this fight on pay-per-view or on Spike? This brings to mind an interesting visual, a huge ring in front of the Capitol Building in Columbus with Ohio politicians squared off in a ring with the politicians from other states, kind of like the ultimate tag team event.
Polls show the electorates’ number one issue is, of course, jobs, so all candidates will be running on the premise and promise to fight for jobs for their districts. For the past 20 years, fighting in Columbus has meant politicians using a “slash-and-burn” economic policy by adopting a cutting-taxes-and-giving-away-the -farm strategy to “lure” new jobs into Ohio. How successful has this strategy been?
In that time, we have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. In 2006, the legislature turned the Ohio tax code on its head again, abolishing the tangibles tax and the corporate tax and cutting the state income tax by 21 percent. We were in an economic doldrum at the time, with revenue plunging across the board. Why would you further cut the revenue stream? The explanation was that this would spur economic development and job creation. Paraphrasing the words of an old Wendy’s advertising ad, where are the jobs?
The real explanation is that the top earners and large corporations walked away with the beef and the rest of us got stuck with an empty bun. The corporate tax that provided a huge revenue stream for the state to fund things like higher education was eliminated; one large corporation bragged this single item saved it $98 million a quarter in taxes or 2 cents per share of their outstanding common stock.
By reducing the taxes the rich and large corporations pay, we have shifted the burden to the bottom 60 percent of Ohioans. The working classes are bearing the burden through paying a disproportionate share of the state income taxes, increased property taxes, sales taxes, state gambling (the poor are the ones who support it), skyrocketing college tuition, higher and higher fees for licenses, drivers, fishing, and hunting and late fees on top of fees.
College tuition has increased many times since I was a freshman in 1973 at the University from $450 a year to over $9,000 with no relief in sight. It does not take genius to see it would be simple to increase revenues to keep tuition down, maybe even lower it, to increase K-12 funding by reinstituting the corporate tax and the higher rate on those who make $200,000 or more. This would bring some form of tax fairness to Ohio, which ranks high on the inequities in its tax structure toward the middle and lower classes which pay more than 60 percent of the taxes and have less than 30 percent of the wealth in Ohio.
Bumper sticker answers are not going to work in the campaign of 2010, for the people can read the handwriting on the wall and are not accepting business as usual.
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