Strickland on Ohio Budget Shortfall
Friday, January 25th, 2008 By David HansenKudos to Governor Strickland for admitting that we can live without a good share of state government spending. He comes to this realization when told that there may not be the tax dollars in the treasury to pay for every dime of spending planned through July of 2009.
Of course, true conservatives knew of the needlessness of much state spending independent of a shortfall in taxes to pay for it all.
Strickland says he doesn’t want to raise tax rates to pay for the planned spending, so good-bye spending….we would hope.
Our 2005 Ohio Piglet and 2006 Ohio Piglet should be helpful for the Governor. The reports document more than enough wasteful and duplicative state expenditures that can be cut in order to close the $1.9 billion shortfall presented in the Governor’s worst case scenario.
Our 2007-08 Piglet report is due out in a few weeks to bring our list of pork and waste fully up-to-date.
Here’s a couple of my favorite piggies and potential cuts:
$22.9 million on the Ohio Arts Council. A fine work of art deserves appreciation. But it doesn’t deserve to be subsidized by our tax dollars.
$6.5 million for the Ohio Business Development Coalition (OBDC) and other “brand-building” activities of the state Department of Development. The OBDC runs an expensive ad campaign in national media designed to lure a special kind of CEO to Ohio. Unfortunately the OBDC’s targets are CEO’s who don’t care about high taxes and high government spending — often because they pocket tax dollars themselves.
Turning a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of Ohio’s business climate is better left to private Chambers of Commerce. If the state really wanted to “build its brand” as a place for CEO’s to invest and grow their businesses, it would eliminate the income tax, end compulsory unionization and end the government monopoly of k-12 education services.
$200,000 for the Ohio Film Office (OFO). The OFO was eliminated from the state budget in 2002, but surprisingly the state just reopened the office. The OFO subsidizes the motion picture industry in an attempt to lure producers to film in Ohio. That is to say, it takes your tax dollars and waves them under the noses of Hollywood and Michael Moore and Sean Penn and all the rest to come here and shoot some scenes on location.
To quote one state official trying to justify the OFC: “But we really thought about it from a tourism perspective, of getting Ohio images, our beautiful scenery and locations like the Old State Reformatory at Mansfield, where they filmed The Shawshank Redemption or Columbus, where they filmed Traffic right across from my office, and its really a win-win.”
That’s two-thumbs down on a tourism strategy that uses taxpayer dollars to entice people to Ohio based on our gruesomely retro prisons and nightmarish crack houses.
To be continued…
Tags: Pork
