News from the Ohio politics
Betsy's Page
With any justice this should be the news that saves Mike DeWine's seat for him in Ohio. As The Sixers on NRO report from a DeWine press release,
<<< "Sherrod Brown admitted the State of Ohio had to take legal action to force him to pay his taxes. As state officials confirmed, Sherrod Brown did not pay the unemployment taxes that every other employer in Ohio is required to pay. Sherrod Brown first said that he did not pay them for 12 years; he is now saying that he made a mistake and that he did finally pay them but only after the State of Ohio took legal action against him.
"The facts are clear: Sherrod Brown didn't pay his taxes. In fact, he didn't pay his taxes for so long that the State of Ohio was forced to take legal action against him to get him to pay what he owed.
"And now the best Sherrod Brown can say is that it was nearly two years that he cheated unemployed Ohio workers out of the money that was due to them. >>>
Ohio has been trending to be a GOP disaster due to the corruption and ineptness of the state party. Mike DeWine has been squishy since the Gang of 14 deal, but he's been good on other conservative issues. Do Ohioans really want to send to the Senate some guy who, in the best view, can't figure out his own taxes or, in the worse case, cheated the state out of the taxes he owed?
Meanwhile, Ken Blackwell, a great candidate, is behind double digits in the governor's race. Unfortunately, and unfairly, he's being tarred with all the lousiness of the Taft Republicans in Ohio and how they've messed up their party and the state. Blackwell has been the one Republican in that state standing against the state party, but he is being pulled down with them. As Jason Riley writes in today's Wall Street Journal, Blackwell recognizes that Ohio has to change its tax system if it hopes to attract new business.
<<< Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist and longtime follower of state politics, said there's something cruelly ironic about Mr. Blackwell paying for the sins of an Ohio GOP that's lost its way. "Ken is the one good Republican in the state of Ohio," says Mr. Vedder. "He was the guy who maintained Republican principles, who wanted moderate spending growth, wanted to use budget surpluses--when we had budget surpluses--to lower taxes, wanted to move to a flat-rate income tax at a relatively low rate. This is the kind of thing Ken has been talking about for years."
Mr. Blackwell is still talking about it today, and for good reason: Ohio has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs--a fifth of its total--in the past five years. The state's 5.7% jobless rate is more than a full percentage point above the national mean. Household incomes lag behind the rest of the country, and mortgage foreclosures continue to rise.
"Capital seeks the path of least resistance and greatest opportunity," said Mr. Blackwell, addressing a small crowd in Meigs County. "We've put too many obstacles in the way of capital investment in Ohio. We have a confiscatory tax code that needs to be changed. We have one of the toughest regulatory roads to navigate in the country."
Later on in an interview, Mr. Blackwell elaborated. And but for the fact that he is 6-foot-4, deep-voiced, bespectacled and black, you might mistake him for another Ronald Reagan. "Ask Honda why they invested in Indiana instead of Ohio," he said. "The bottom line is that it would have cost them $30 million more a year. Why? Because of escalating workers comp costs, taxes, regulatory compliance costs . . . We've got to understand what we're up against. It's easier to do business in other places." >>>
Meanwhile, Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio has expressed what he thinks of the people he's hoping to govern. Julie Ponzi of No Left Turns makes this observation.
<<< Strickland recently made something of a minor gaffe (minor only because it was conspicuously under-reported) when he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that business is suffering in Ohio because people don’t want to come to a state that is "backwards" in its thinking. Ohio is backwards, in his judgment, because it is unfriendly to the notions of unlimited abortion and government funding for stem cell research. In that same forum (before Strickland’s gaffe) Blackwell argued that businesses weren’t flocking to Ohio because of over-regulation and high taxes. Today on Hewitt’s show, Ken made the cogent point that the difference between him and Ted Strickland is rather simple: Strickland thinks your taxes are fine and your values are wrong. Blackwell thinks your taxes are wrong and your values are right. >>>
Read the rest of her post to get an idea of the values that Strickland is willing to uphold. Are Ohioans really going to vote for a guy whose knowledge of economics leads him to think that companies won't invest in a state because they oppose abortion, government funding for stem-cell research, or gay marriage? Is that really why Honda didn't build in Ohio?
Well, I guess if I were a believer in Salutary Defeat, I'd say that it would be a good lesson for people to learn what happens when they vote for someone with such a poor sense of how businesses operate. But, sadly, they've been electing such people for years and many still haven't learned that salutary lesson.
UPDATE: According to this story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brown's tax problem was that he waited until 1994 to pay his unemployment taxes for 1992, but once the state filed a lien, he paid up. The state of Ohio just took over 10 years to release the lien because they just screwed up. So, it isn't quite as bad as it sounds from the DeWine press release. Still, he did somehow neglect to pay those taxes in the first place.
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sixers.nationalreview.com
opinionjournal.com
noleftturns.ashbrook.org
hughhewitt.townhall.com
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