BuckeyeBlog

First, the good news: Although it’s not ideal that legislators have advanced a bill to impose a foreclosure mortorium, they did remove the egregious (and unconstitutional) “cramdown” provision that would allow judges to modify home loan contracts. As the Buckeye Institute’s Maurice Thompson said in his testimony about this bill: “House Bill 3, as currently written, would clearly raise interest rates for prospective homeowners, thus harming more Ohioans than it would help, and enhancing the likelihood of increased delinquencies.” The removal of the “cramdown” provision lessens the harm to Ohioans but does not eliminate it.

Now, the bad: Get ready for your taxes to go up. As the Toledo Blade reports, “Gov. Ted Strickland yesterday said he won’t take the possibility of a tax increase off the table as he negotiates with legislative leaders over how to deal with the state’s budget woes.” It does go on to say that the governor doesn’t think such a hike is a good idea. At least he’s paying lip service to keeping taxes in line, but the amount of spending he supports makes it a virtual necessity, unfortunately. As I pointed out a couple months ago:

When there were rumbles in the air of an impending recession in 2007, the governor and legislators could have done the prudent thing: limit spending growth, refrain from creating new programs, and planned for the future. Instead, with only one dissenting vote, the Republican General Assembly sent a big-spending budget to the Democratic governor that, among other things, created a new middle class entitlement to government health care.

Now taxes will need to be raised to pay for this fiscal recklessness. In the past the governor has denied the need to do this and, in an attempt to avoid making the hard decisions, got the federal government to pony up billions of “stimlus” dollars to cover the state deficit. Now it appears he can no longer avoid the issue. Too bad it’s the taxpayers who will, literally, be paying for the bad decisions in Columbus.

Tags: cramdown, foreclosures, General Assembly, government spending, Governor Ted Strickland, Taxes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Accountable Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.