Sherrod Brown: 'Wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes'

In a conference call Wednesday with Ohio media in advance of his upcoming “Dignity of Work” tour to several early presidential primary states, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown didn’t want to quibble over tax policy specifics.

What he did agree to as a baseline position for him is that the wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes.

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (right)
speaks to Ohio's leading
independent reporter

Sen. Brown is preparing to launch his "Dignity of Work" tour today, Wednesday, January 30, 2018, from Brunswick, Ohio, where Brown previewed his tour to Ohio media. 

After the tour launches in Ohio, Sen. Brown, whose win last November in Ohio has placed him among the large pool of potential Democratic presidential hopefuls, heads to Iowa on Thursday.

I asked Sen. Brown to comment whether his tax policy differs are tracks two progressive tax policy plans released recently, one by new House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Sen.Elizabeth Warren. Both Cortex and Warren have plans that hike taxes on the very wealthy.

Central to Brown’s “Dignity of Work” theme are rising wages and better benefits. Over the decades, however, corporate America has mostly not delivered on those two objectives. The President’s tax bill passed without input from Democrats including Sen. Brown has done little to remedy stagnant wages and job benefits that include affordable health care.

Brown ticked off three bills he said penalize companies who don’t do right by their workers, tell reporters on the call that he wasn’t going to pick and choose between specific parts of plans released by Cortez or Warren

To be specific, though, he did agree that the wealthy are not paying their fair share of taxes.

“I want the dignity of work to be the center piece of every Democratic campaign in the country,” he said. “Respecting and honoring work. That’s the purpose of the tour."

Sen. Brown is seen by many as the working man’s public official who might be able to do what Hillary Clinton couldn’t do two years ago, namely, capture key heartland states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are key to winning the Electoral College.

“It’s not enough to tax the rich,” he said, adding, “Tax breaks for the middle” are also needed.

Brown, who was on the short list of VP candidates for Clinton in 2016, described the White House as a “retreat for Wall Street executives.” Depictions like this place him next to or very near to the same sentiments expressed by Cortez and Warren and others, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who gave Clinton a run for her money in 2016.

Brown wants Congressional Republicans to stand up to Trump, and if need be, override any veto he might executive on future budgeting bills, especially those that could trigger another shut down of the federal government.

Brown expressed concern over trying to “straight jacket the executive branch” given there has never been a Commander in Chief like Trump who “takes pride in shutting government down.” 

Brown said the frigid temperatures in Ohio will no doubt dampen turnout to his kickoff event today.

Can 'The National Chaplain' engineer a White House win for 'Rumpled Suits?'

For everyone obsessed with political intrigue surrounding the growing list of declared and undeclared White House candidates, the unlikely but possible interaction between two prominent Buckeye State politicos is worth a cursory discussion because it's only happened once before, in 1920, when Warren G. Harding, a Republican, beat James Cox, a Democrat. 

Former Ohio Gov. John Rasich

In Republican world, President Donald Trump is the foregone reelection nominee. Providing he survives a sudden health event that would incapacitate him or withstands an attempt to impeach him by now-majority House-caucus Democrats, any other Republican with eyes for Washington will find any attempt to unseat him through the GOP primary process a costly and grueling uphill battle.

Enter stage right, Ohio's recently departed two-term Ohio Governor, John Kasich. The "National Chaplain" got shellacked in 2016 when he and more than a dozen other Republicans were dispatched by The Donald like so many ducks at a county fair shooting gallery. Remaining in the race long past his use-by date, Kasich has shown himself to be a sore loser who found his media niche in being the Trump critic's dancing bear.

Now gone as governor, Kasich hopes his new post-governor gig as a CNN political contributor will keep him before the nation's eyes as a Republican alternative to Trump and his base voters who stand by their man's policies and style.

In one of his TV appearances this past weekend after he landed a talent agent and became employed as another CNN political pundit, John Kasich no doubt relished his guest appearance on Bill Maher's new season opening show Friday. Whatever rosy outcome he thought might happen, didn't, as Maher put Kasich in irons with one simple question followed by one simple encouragement.

The upshot of Kasich's opening segment, during which he tried but failed to impress Maher with his now-cemented narrative that he's got new ideas other Republicans don't,  Maher urged Kasich to run so he could do the nation a favor by splitting the Republican vote, that would thereby help elect a Democrat president.

Maher labeled the 66-year old Kasich as "Republican Classic" even as Kasich congratulated himself for accepting expanded Medicaid when so many other GOP governors said no. A former Fox News channel TV host, Kasich has honed his public relations shtick over four decades in public office. Trying to schmooz Maher, Kasich jokingly asked the progressive and very liberal HBO host of "Real Time" if he wanted to run his presidential campaign? Maher said no.

Dubbed the "National Chaplain" because he loves to invoke his sanctimonious Bible beliefs into his ideas for governance, Kasich became easily paralyzed when Maher asked him the simple question of what Republicans stand for these days? Further quieting the glib governor, who tried to dominate the segment, Maher told him that he couldn't win, but he should enter the race anyhow so his candidacy could help a Democrat win the presidency in 2020. Unable to explain to Maher why Republicans are as insane as the president, Kasich fumbled his answer with more platitudes—including his current favorite, "change happens from the bottom up"—and vagueness.

For all his many sermonettes about his many new ideas, Kasich offers none because lazy reporters don't ask him to name them.

Some simple background on Ohio politics shows that Republicans have dominated state level politics going back to the early 1990s. During this long red wedding, one Democrat politico who voters kept returning to office was Sherrod Brown, a Democrat. Last November Brown won his third 6-year term in Washington by defeating his GOP and Trump-endorsed opponent by about six points.

Known for his now trademark features of a gravelly voice and Boss suits appropriately rumpled, Brown hasn't declared his yet declared his presidential candidacy as have eight others, including Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Richard Ojeda and Andrew Yang.

Nonetheless, Brown's interesting victory in Trump Ohio has created a buzz about him running for president. 

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown talks
to Ohio's leading independent
report

From his early days in the Ohio House to his two-terms as Secretary of State to seven terms in the US House of Representatives and his dozen years in the US Senate, Sen. Brown has shown none of Kasich's Aaron Burr-like raw, manipulative ambition to be president.

Down home, Brown has built his bona fides by championing common workers and programs and policies that address their needs. From worker and union rights to fair-trade policies and battling Wall Street, from defending women's rights and advocating for a healthcare public option, Brown is the virtual polar opposite of John Kasich on so many issues.

Kasich has encased himself in Reagan-era beliefs that market dynamics will solve most problems and that going to bat for supply-side CEOs, especially lowering their income tax rates, will create jobs and wealth as their largess trickles down to the less well off.

In Brown's world, the "Dignity of Work" has become his new rallying cry as he contemplates more than a brief flirtation with the prospect of running for president, as others think he should do. His aw-shucks demeanor, world views and pragmatic economic affiliation with America's shrinking middle class could hold the key to unlocking the Electoral College vote in 2020. A white, male, moderate from an important Heartland state like Ohio, Brown's place on the next ticket could prevent Trump from winning the Midwestern states he won two years ago, that put him over the top and into the Oval Office.

Remember, it was just two years ago that Brown made Hillary Clinton's short-list of VP potentials.
So it begs the question, if John "Classic Republican" Kasich does what he teases about doing—actually declaring he's a candidate for president—would his vanity campaign, guaranteed to lose as Bill Maher said it would, help elect a Democratic ticket Sherrod Brown might find himself on?

Brown is the "dark horse" candidate for some, should he announce he's a candidate, which becomes increasingly possible the more he talks about plans to visit some early primary states. He's said that he'll make a determination in the coming months about whether he's going to launch that campaign, resign himself to being a strong voice for whomever Democrats do nominate to be their standard bearer.

As for John Kasich, his predictable and now rote routine as National Chaplain soothing the pangs of a dysfunctional nation may wear thin on CNN, especially if and when anyone with any history of his record in Congress or in Ohio challenges him on his long-held policies and programs.

Meanwhile, Maher showed how easily Kasich can be disarmed. Maybe other reporters, especially the high-paid coastal elites who adore him despite his dismal record in Ohio, will break with the good-old boy media fraternity and take it to one of their own.

Gone as governor, Ohio media finally dares criticize John Kasich

For long-time students of John Richard Kasich who have followed his performance politician's career arc from LSC intern to Governor of Ohio, it's curious that Ohio media in general and the statehouse press corps in particular are finally daring to criticize him in ways they couldn't muster over the last eight years.

Gov. Kasich with his starting team:
Mary Taylor and Mark Kvamme.

Editorials in the Toledo Blade, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dayton Daily News and Akron Beacon Journal, among others, paint a picture of the petulant and prickly state CEO as someone who had tense relations with so many would-be partners, especially his ultra-right Republican lawmakers, who sent him a gaggle of terrible bills he signed into law. In his second term, they were so out of step with him that they mustered the votes necessary to override several of his vetoes.

Always a showman, Kasich, who's honed his performance politician chops over decades in the public eye, has landed an agent and his sought-after post-governor gig as a CNN contributor. His landing an agent and his hiring by President Donald Trump's most despised TV network made news on the day all other Buckeye media was fixated on the swearing-in ceremonies, and the six executive orders new Gov. Mike DeWine signed as his first policy initiatives on his first day in office.

Finally confessing after years of being reticent to do so, Ohio's legacy newspapers repeated Kasich's false but now set-in-concrete talking points about his great (or not) creation of jobs, his saving a state whose emergency fund was depleted to 89 cents when he was first elected in 2010, and his most worthwhile although very misunderstood adoption of expanded Medicaid. They all recalled his first big blunder, pushing to gut public sector unions via SB5 and included his calculated PR error to boycott welcoming Republicans who came to Cleveland for the party's national nominating convention in 2016..

As the dancing bear of anti-Trumpers, Kasich, now 66, will become another 24/7 talking pundit on CNN, where he'll keep his "voice" in front of a world-wide TV audience even though he's admitted repeatedly, as often as lazy TV personalities asked him the question, that he couldn't beat Trump if the race were held today. If he's wishy washy on his chances at mounting his third run for the Oval Office in 20 years, come 2020, what will change his fortunes going forward now that he's no longer leader of a major, and very red state like Ohio, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by nearly nine points, and he as the sitting governor beat Trump in his lone primary win even though he couldn't push past the 50-percent mark in his home state?

While a handful of papers dared look back on his tenure to weigh-in on what he did right and wrong, every one of them left many of his scandals on the table. Each avoided laying out some of his biggest political pitfalls, including his dirty-tricks campaign in 2014 to derail a potential challenger, Charley Earl of the Libertarian Party, his erosion of voting rights, signing into law more than 20 bills that hurt women's health rights, his combative personality that criticized politicians and party politics even though he was guilty on both counts in many cases, and two huge failures, one on for-profit charter schools and a second on the degraced husband of his chief of staff who falsified data on a federal education grant form.

Kasich's inspector general released a report on Bill Lager, owner of the Electric Classroom of Tomorrow, who made large donations to Kasich and other Republicans over the years after receiving tens of millions of dollars that should have gone to public schools but for policies Kasich and his GOOP legislature put into place that kept the money flowing even when the students at these for-profit charters performed poorly. Kasich took Ohio from 5th best in the nation on education to 23rd, earning Ohio the nickname of "The Wild West" of charter schools.

Where was the outrage of these broad sheets when it came to his near abandonment of his governor's duties, his fleecing of taxpayers for millions to protect him on a presidential campaign trail he never once mentioned he would undertake if reelected in 2014? There was no apology by the Plain Dealer, who seemed proud that the paper had endorsed him twice, for taking down a video of his juvenile behavior at an editorial meeting that included two other governor hopefuls?

As the facts show, these papers dropped the ball or were blind to when Ohio's turnaround from the Great Recession started, and it wasn't when the glib governor he came into office. Former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, as Bureau of Labor Statistics charts show, took the entire brunt of giant job losses yet managed through skilled budgeting and stimulus help from Washington to send the job creation line heading up again before he left office.

The now infamous claim by Team Kasich that Ohio was in a ditch and facing a budget hole of $8 billion is an urban myth Kasich exploited that newspapers let him exploit. The truth is the $8 billion hole figure was only an estimate by then Republican Auditor of State Mary Taylor. Taylor's made up figure was taken as fact, as the real gap was billions lower as fathomed by budget experts. Taylor went on to become Kasich's Lt. Governor running mate, who cut herself loose from him when she ran for the top job.

Out of office, John Kasich will do what he does best: motor his mouth on TV and in editorials about solving problems he's been part of creating for decades. Kasich, who made his bones by decrying debts and deficits, oversaw the largest budgets in Ohio history when he was simultaneously whining that Ohio was broke. He created a super-secret, private jobs group (JobsOhio) he said when first running for office that he would head until the Ohio Constitutional said he couldn't do that. JobsOhio, beside being a money hog, didn't live up to Kasich's claim of how great it was.

His totally unreported scandal on the pension front was allowing Wall Street managers so soak state pension funds for huge fees even though these funds have little to show from spending millions on exorbitant fees. "Good work if you can get it," one Ohio editorial writer wrote.

Maybe highest on Kasich's list of shameful actions is how he skewed Ohio's tax system to favor the rich by shifting the tax burden to the poor. The Akron Beacon Journal makes this important point in an editorial that outlines how Kasich, a multi-millionaire himself, cut income taxes that were sold as winners but have produced the opposite effect. Kasich's tax scheme produced a budget that was $1 billion short, that apostles of no-new taxes filled with budget cuts.

As the ABJ notes, over the last decade, including eight years under Gov. Kasich and an Republican-led legislature, "state spending on key priorities down sharply in real dollars, for instance, higher education, down 20 percent; transportation, 42 percent; local governments, 46 percent. Such trajectories do not point to a stronger Ohio economy or improved quality of life. So there is much to be gained in a more equitable tax system that generates additional revenue."

Citizen Kasich in 2010

decries government regulations

In his latest op-ed piece in USA Today, the Catholic boy who once wanted to become a priest but found fame and fortune through partisan politics more to his liking says his Republican Party is mired in 1950's thinking, and that new ideas, of which he will claim to be the father of, are what's needed now. What those new ideas are, if they are different than his life-long belief in supply-side economics and free market mechanics and his desire to overturn Roe v Wade, are a mystery.

One new idea Kasich should embrace, but he won't because he's stuck in the past as deeply as he claims the GOP is, would be championing a Canadian-style, Medicare-for-all health system. Another new idea he might voice on CNN is that America's military buildup is a prime driver of our debt and deficits, a subject he says can be controlled with a federal balanced budget amendment, which virtually all sane economists say would be disastrous if all options to cut spending—including military expenditures—are not on the table.

Trying to parlay himself as a so-called "moderate" is one of his trump cards. But as noted here, he's not a moderate. With media encased in its belief that he is a moderate because his talks like a moderate even though his real record shows he's not, media will continue to hide his real record.

Kasich's quirky, shoot from the mouth personalty has rubbed virtually all people and parties, especially his own, the wrong way. As many a Capitol Square observer has observed, he's got his ideas and if his ideas aren't yours, good lucking coming to a compromise with him.

As many a Capitol Square observer has observed, he's got his ideas and if yours aren't his, he's not with you. All his talking about coming together through compromise is something his track record in Ohio shows he doesn't do well.