Apples-to-apples comparisons are complicated. But $8.4 billion in “one-time” spending money, expressed in terms of Ohio’s $50.5 billion General Revenue Fund budget, is 17 cents of every $1 Ohio is now spending.
There are lots of reasons Democrat Strickland and legislators of both parties spent one-time money, but the simplest explanation is that no one at the Statehouse likes to say “no” (a) when aiming to be re-elected and (b) while pressing human needs beckon in Ohio.
Stump-speech sanctimony aside, a legislator who doesn’t bring home the bacon may be a one-term legislator.
Still, as political cover before Statehouse sailors staggered ashore from the S.S. Spend-O-Rama in 2009, they did what every Ohio politician does to sidestep tough questions: Appoint a study commission.
The result: Budget Planning and Management was created and told to figure how, in 2011, Statehouse spenders could suddenly turn conservative.
The commission’s six members — Democrats Dale Miller of Cleveland, Vernon Sykes of Akron and Jay Goyal of Mansfield, Republicans Chris Widener of Springfield, Ron Amstutz of Wooster and Shannon Jones of suburban Cincinnati — are smart, capable people.
So are their aides, and the men and women of the non-partisan Legislative Service Commission, which researches Ohio’s budgets and laws.
But if the commission’s final reports (one per party) were prepared as brain food, they turned out to have the nutritional value of Cocoa Puffs or Twinkies. The panel made broad, general recommendations with as much bite as a gift-shop plaque. The only real difference in the final reports is how deftly each one tried to duck unpalatable facts.
Republicans, for instance, didn’t want to admit that, earlier this decade, they botched tax-reform. The Commercial Activity Tax, fashioned in 2005 to replace the local property tax on business equipment and inventories and the state’s corporate franchise tax, is fine in concept. But the CAT rate is too low.
And in 2007, the legislature permanently (permanently as can be, given term-limits) earmarked 70 percent of Commercial Activity Tax receipts for K-12 schools, an earmark that originally was to end in mid-2018.
Also in 2005, the legislature hammered down Ohio’s income tax rates by 21 percent, phased in at 4.2 percent a year for five years. (Legislators postponed the fifth, 4.2 percent drop, scheduled for 2010, until 2011.)
The GOP spurned warnings that, in combination, their tax policies could make budgeting-balancing in Columbus exceedingly tough if the U.S. economy — as it has — flattened state income-tax collections.
What commission Democrats failed to observe is that Strickland’s decision to let even ultra-wealthy homeowners claim Ohio’s “homestead” property-tax exemption for older people also saps the budget.
Maybe Strickland wanted to shorten breadlines in, say, Hunting Valley, New Albany, Oakwood or Indian Hill. But the cost to Ohio’s budget — which reimburses public schools and local government for every homestead-exempted penny — ballooned from $69 million in (pre-Strickland) 2004 to $336 million in 2008, his second year as governor.
That’s a spending increase of almost 400 percent, driven by a subsidy that wealthy Ohioans clearly don’t need. Perhaps Democrats thought they’d be shown gratitude Nov. 2. Instead, they got shown the door.
Thomas Suddes is an adjunct assistant professor at Ohio University. Send e-mail to tsuddes@gmail.com.