Plucked from "The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy," this New York Times article made a true statement: "No amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens,which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country."
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| Outgoing Ohio Gov. John R. Kasich |
After eight years of outgoing Governor John R. Kasich's reverse Robin Hood policies, many of which took from the poor and gave to the rich, he signed into law a host of obstacles to hurdle for many to secure public benefits, including a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion.
Meanwhile, three of Ohio's big cities—Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo—continue to rank among the nation's most distressed, as defined by the "2018 Distressed Cities Index," compiled by The Economic Innovation Group, located in Washington D.C. Other small cities like Youngstown, where its economic backbone was made of steel, have stood helpless as half their populations left as the corporate tide of jobs and benefits receded to wash ashore elsewhere. When giant corporations like General Motors stiff one-time "beehive" again, as appears to be the case with shuttering the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant and relocating those jobs to other facilities far away, Ohio takes another economic hit it won't recover from.
Voting for Donald Trump for president over Hillary Clinton by almost nine points in 2016, rural Ohioans—comprised of the same group of fearful Republicans who hated Mitt Romney's "47%" because they are takers, not creators—seem to want their own handout under the guise of being the "forgotten man."
Another view of the so-called forgotten man, that the forgotten man doesn't want to discuss, is that the forgotten men and women of Buckeye State farm county don't have and don't want to acquire the education or skills modern companies look for in workers (see Amazon above). They also won't or can't move to where 21st century job are migrating to (not Ohio) and think corporations acting in the best interest of shareholders, not government working in the public interest, is their free-market answer when reality shows business leaders (viz. Romney's job creator class) will abandon them without shame or regret, administering in the process great harm to communities who competed for their presence, often with tax incentives or public brides as some may see the practice of business attraction.
Kasich, Ohio's 66-year old term-limited state CEO whose tried and twice failed to become the GOP nominee for president, received help from a like-minded fiscal- and socially-conservative GOP-led legislature to cut taxes at every opportunity, thereby redistributing money upwards from the rural poor working at minimum wages jobs, if they have work at all, to already wealthy corporations and individuals who don't share the Christmas spirit of helping the forgotten and forlorn.
The promise of more jobs from lower taxes has been a long-held urban myth by Kasich and his supply-side ilk. But as reality has clearly shown, it's proved to produce more fantasy than rising take-home wages. For reasons based largely on shifting demographics, and an obsession by state lawmakers to pass socially conservative bills that put Ohio among the nation's most backward looking states, corporations like Google or Apple or Amazon don't want to locate their growing ranks of female workers, and their daughters, in states with anti-women health measures. Kasich has signed about a dozen into law so far.
Not letting up from its Medieval ways, the 132nd General Assembly will send two more Right-to-Life endorsed bills to him as the 2018 lame-duck sessions quacks to a close. Among them is the "Heartbeat Bill," a draconian measure that eliminates abortion when a fetal heartbeat is found and puts doctors involved in jeopardy of committing a criminal offense.
When a historically strict Catholic country like Ireland where abortion was banned legalizes it by amending the Constitution, Ohio striving to be old Ireland is indeed a strange tale of backward thinking for seriously out of whack lawmakers who pass such bills and governors who sign them into law.
Kasich and company think they can avoid their real record of lost opportunity and unnecessary hurdles by talking about the peril of national debt. He argues for a balanced budget amendment to remedy government spending, but it's government spending in communist China—where millionaires and billionaires are born daily—that pushes the centuries old, dirt-poor nation forward as it becomes the largest economy in the world, where the Chinese Dream of an expanding middle-class is more viable today that the American Dream of middle-class status is shrinking by the day.
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| Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China, second tallest in the world. |
Maybe one way Ohio can find its future is to have China annex it? By doing this, China's central government, which never shuts down as President Trump wants to do soon, can spend to rebuild bridges like the Brent-Spence, so important to commerce, and build a new 21st century version that includes high-speed trains that cruise along at 190-mph. In China today, spectacular feats of engineering are both amazing and commonplace.
To Make Ohio Great Again, maybe some "Belt and Road" programs on the scale China's leader Xi JinPing is pushing for countries it wants to partner and do business with is just what the doctor ordered to drag an aging, backward-looking, former great state like Ohio whose political leadership has been corrupted by decades of faulty thinking into the modern world.
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