Post Tagged with: "economics"

For a recent project, I’ve been researching organizations and values within organizations. I happened to come across On Value and Values by Douglas K. Smith because of the following quote: For many years now, I have heard people speak about value and values disjointedly, as though the singular, value, and […]

Monday night Ohio Governor John Kasich delivered his state of the state speech.

Governor John Kasich speaking with attendees at the 2016 First in the Nation Town Hall (photo by Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0)

He cribbed the biblical Reagan “city on a hill metaphor” to describe Ohio:

All of these things have helped Ohio move up to higher, more solid ground, and, if you look, the clouds are moving apart and the sun is beginning to shine, and we can get a glimpse of the summit ahead. We’ve got much further to go, but the success we’ve had gives us the confidence to climb higher. We’re not hopeless, we’re hopeful. We’re not wandering, we have direction. Let’s keep going.

As an Ohioan, I’d like to tell a different story.

It’s a story that appears in bits and pieces in city & school financial reports, in letters to the editor and editorials, in economic analyses, but the full story has largely hid from public sight because it’s not a single sensationalist event.

It’s not a story about a person or administration because you have to go back further than that to see the pattern.

You have to go back further than that to see how a state gets budgeted back to the stone age.

The pattern is simple but takes place over a long period of time: shift tax burden, create deficit, blame government, defund government, repeat.

And unfortunately, it’s a story that’s not just happening in Ohio, but at a national level and in many states across the nation because it’s being pushed by influential corporate groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The story begins in 2005 …

This should be the economic platform of the Democratic party: “The small businesses are the ones we have to protect, and they don’t think it’s fair they pay more in taxes than the largest corporations who ship jobs overseas,” Kathy Hochul (D- NY)

I recently stumbled upon a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that explains much of what is going on in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and other states across the country.

The report is entitled The Impact of State Employment Policies on Job Growth – A 50-State Review.

A quick executive summary of this report is that Wisconsin should become more like South Carolina. California should become more like Mississippi. Massachusetts should become more like Kansas.