The central lesson of Ohio’s budget mess isn’t that the state’s checkbook is in shreds. It’s that Ohio — the Ohio of Edison and Kettering, of Rita Dove and Toni Morrison, of 11 million men and women who need to be educated, protected or doctored — is hostage to childishness in Columbus.
Attention, ladies and gentlemen of the General Assembly, and Gov. Ted Strickland’s staff: This isn’t a student council election at Jerkwater High or a Friday night football rivalry. This is serious business, even if adults seem to be missing in action at the Statehouse.
A rickety budget means Ohio will have to pay higher interest rates to borrow money. A budget held together with bubble gum and Scotch tape means no one, from a 1,000-pupil school district to the Cleveland Clinic’s board, can plan for anything except chaos. And art-of-the-deal budgeting merely postpones Ohio’s reckoning with problems that worsen daily. That may suit a term-limited General Assembly, but no one else.
In effect, this is what Ohioans face at their Capitol: Mom and Dad left for the weekend but forgot to lock up the booze.
The Democrat-run Ohio House, purported allies of Democrat Strickland, pulled the rug out from under him. The governor aimed to rein in Ohio’s budget-busters, Medicaid and prisoner counts. The House, fearful of Willie Horton ads on the one front, grateful for nursing-home donations on the other, refused. Speaker Armond Budish’s Democrats fattened spending by $600 million.
Then Monday, in what was more a sermon than a speech, Strickland said Ohio „will have sinned against our children“ unless it makes education No. 1. Yet he sent the House a budget longer on school promises than cash, whose initial, federal-dependent school funding math couldn’t have passed anyone’s proficiency test.
Tuesday, after the Democratic House’s budget had landed on Senate Republicans‘ desks, two Strickland aides, Budget Director J. Pari Sabety and Tax Commissioner Richard Levin, revealed that income tax collections are dribbling, not pouring, into Columbus. And everyone claimed to be shocked.
So, through June 30 alone, when the current budget expires, a new, $600 million to $900 million hole gapes, not counting billions in one-time dollars the upcoming budget spends. Getting Ohio through May and June will drain the rainy-day fund — reserved, until now, for the next biennium.
GOP Senate President Bill Harris says all legislators can do is cut, so the Senate is honing its hacksaws. Harris took tax increases off the table, and — he said — lobby-touted slot machines. Harris knows „cutting“ an entitlement-anchored budget (if you’re poor and sick, you legally must get „x“ and „y“) is show biz, but he, too, is a prisoner of political lore that even fair taxes equal defeat.
The responsibility of leadership is to lead.
If Ted Strickland really sees his school plan in such messianic terms, he must tell Ohioans he’ll gladly face defeat in 2010 if that gets him the money he needs in 2009 to do what he claims Ohio must do.
If Armond Budish really wants to brag that a Democrat-run House is a new day for Ohio, he must end business as usual.
And if Bill Harris — gentleman, businessman, believer, Marine — wants to make a mark before he retires next year, he’ll knock heads like a drill sergeant so Ohio can stride into the future, rather than sink in the slogans and feuds of the past.