Texas v. Ohio
The Wall Street Journal opens with an editorial today, Texas v. Ohio,
comparing Lone Star prosperity with Buckeye decline: “Texas has been
prospering while Ohio lags, and the reasons are instructive about what
works and what doesn’t in economic policy.”
According to the WSJ,
“Let’s start with the fact that Texas’s growth puts
the lie to the myth that free trade costs American jobs.”
In his piece, Ohio and NAFTA,
Buckeye Institute Scholar Dr. Joseph Zoric points out that “As the
international economy expands and world markets become more important,
Ohio should be in a strategic position to remain competitive. This
means that the legislature needs to focus on making Ohio a more
business friendly state by formulating a tax and regulation system that
attracts rather than discourages business investment both domestically
and from abroad.”
The WSJ
notes that “…Texas is a right to work state and has been adding jobs by
the tens of thousands.” Going all the way back to 1998 the Buckeye
Institute has tracked the costs of compulsory unionization for Ohio
jobs. In Manufacturing jobs increase in right-to-work states, shrink in Ohio,
the author points out that “jobs increased by 493,300 from 1982 to 1998
in right-to- work states, while declining 1,063,200 in states with
compulsory union laws. Ohio, which does not have a right-to-work law,
lost 66,900 manufacturing jobs over the same period.”
“Ohio Governor Ted Strickland,” the Journal writes, “a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, blames his state’s problems on President Bush.” The Buckeye Blog carried a posting last year Euphemism of the Day and Other Unemployment Woes showing in graphic form how Ohio has lagged the national economy since 2000 at the least.
Its
author asks, “As the chart from Ohio's budget office shows, there's
been no long and deep national recession, just the phenomenon of job
creation in Ohio coming to a complete halt. Could national policies be
so insidious to Ohio while so advantageous for the rest of the country
as to make our unemployment fund a victim of outside forces? This
hardly seems likely.”
The WSJ
also puts blame for our state’s condition on Ohio’s tax structure:
“Ohio politicians deplore plant closings even as they impose the third
highest corporate income tax in the country (10.5%) and the sixth
highest personal income tax (8.87%).” In Grinding to a Halt: Ohio’s Tax Policy and its Impact on Economic Growth,
Buckeye Institute scholar Dr. Richard Vedder opens his major study of
the costs of Ohio’s tax burden with this assessment: “Ohio has rapidly
increased its tax burden in the last generation, while its economic
performance has been among the poorest of the American states. These
two phenomena are closely related.”
The Journal
sums up it editorial with “The challenge for our national economy in a
world of competition is to become more like Texas and less like Ohio.”
Buckeye Institute President David Hansen takes a look at the challenges
Ohio creates for itself in Thoughts on Ohio’s Climb up the Tax Burden Ladder and
finds that our state’s dwindling economic freedom translates into
“…less ‘economic activity’ [which] is a sanitized way of saying our
climb up the tax burden ladder has meant fewer jobs, less wages for
those lucky enough to have jobs, and less opportunity for our states’
citizens to realize the prosperity their talent and effort could afford
them elsewhere.”
