Finally, in 1987, 14 years after ratifying 1973’s Ohio Lottery amendment, voters did earmark profits for K-12 schools: How much is that? About 11.5 cents of every $1 Ohio’s budget spends on K-12 schools.
Thus: Ohio Lottery profits transferred to Ohio K-12 schools for the year that’ll begin July 1 equal about $1.5 billion.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s estimated total state sales tax collections this fiscal year: $13.9 billion. Estimated state income tax collections: $10 billion. And what the owners of home- and business real estate paid statewide in 2022 (60%-plus for public schools): $19.5 billion.
Oh, and estimated 2023 Ohio Sports Gaming Receipts Tax revenue: $937 million, with 98% of that funding interscholastic athletics and other extracurricular activities.
In contrast that $937 million Ohio’s total, the American Gaming Association reports Pennsylvania generates a near-nation-leading $3.6 billion in gambling taxes for the commonwealth and localities. But it’s only 8 cents per $1 of Ohio’s General Revenue Fund.
Sorry, Corn Belt barkers: It’s time to peddle a different vintage of snake oil.
Saving Ohio’s libraries:
Countless Ohioans who love their best-in-the-nation public libraries and want state senators to kill a sneaky Ohio House amendment undercutting library funding in Ohio’s pending budget (Amended Substitute House Bill 96) might like this quote:
“I have an unshakeable conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of using them,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in 1939 to a retiring librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam.
The job’s now vacant. President Trump fired then-Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to hold that post.
Trump appointed as acting librarian Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, “who represented ... Trump during his 2024 criminal trial,” the Associated Press reported.
It’s unclear if Blanche, a graduate of Beloit College and Brooklyn Law School, has ever managed a library. The Library of Congress, founded in 1800, is the world’s largest library.
Oh, and as for state Senate Republicans who think FDR, a rooting-tooting liberal would speak up for libraries, he carried Republican Senate President Rob McColley’s home county, Henry, both in 1932 and 1936.
Four GOP candidates for Ohio treasurer:
Last week’s column mistakenly failed to include former state Sen. Niraj Antani, a suburban Dayton, as among the Republicans seeking to be elected state treasurer next year. (The incumbent, Findlay Republican Robert Sprague, is term-limited and seeking to be elected secretary of state.)
U.S.-born Antani, age 34, an Ohio State graduate, was a three-term Ohio House member before winning a Senate seat. His parents came to America from India. Antani, an adherent of the Hindu faith, was the state Senate’s first Indian American member. To Antani’s credit, he supposedly so irked the GOP clique running the Senate that, in effect, it drew him out of his Senate district in a brazen gerrymander.
Other Republicans seeking to become treasurer: Ex-state Rep. Jay Edwards, of Athens County’s Nelsonville; Sen. Kristina Roegner, of Hudson; and Lake County Treasurer Michael Zuren, of Painesville. As four-term Republican Gov. James A. Rhodes supposedly said when hearing potential challengers mentioned, “Let ‘em all run.”
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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