BuckeyeBlog

Governor Strickland thinks you’re too fat. But don’t worry, the Healthy Ohio Plan is here to save you. All that’s needed is your tax money and your willingness to submit to social engineering. Among other things you’ll be paying for:

• Supporting farmers’ markets (don’t farmers get enough welfare already?)
• A social marketing campaign to tell you how to lose weight (funny, I thought that the variety of weight loss TV shows, magazines, and websites could do this. What’s next? A tax credit for joining Jenny Craig?)
• Creating the Ohio Community Wellness Alliance to coordinate weight-loss efforts across the state (how does funding more jobs for bureaucrats help Ohioans lose weight?
• Developing a comprehensive database to track obesity in the state (Big Brother is going to make sure you’re not so big)

It’s not that these goals (and the others proposed by the plan) are so bad. It’s just that we don’t need a government bureaucracy to implement them. If you want to lose weight, you can exercise more or eat healthier. You can enter a program. You can get gastric bypass surgery. You can do a variety of things. Even with all these options available, though, people are still overweight.

Governor Strickland and his health bureaucrats don’t like that some Ohioans have failed to live a thin lifestyle, though, and so tax dollars are going to be spent in what is almost certainly a vain effort to make Ohioans shape up. No aid to farmers’ markets or government help lines with weight loss tips will make people lose weight who do not have the desire to do so. Does the governor really think people are overweight because they can’t find a farmers’ market or don’t know that eating healthier and exercising more is good for them?

The governor should spend less time worrying about your bloated waistline and more time worrying about the state’s bloated budget.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Buckeye Institute Viewpoint on Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray’s decision to dismiss the state’s public nuisance lawsuit against paint manufacturers. Former Ohio AG Marc Dann brought the lawsuit in 2007 seeking to force the paint manufacturers to pay for the costs of cleaning up thousands of buildings that had been neglected for decades. The state claimed that the paint manufacturers were responsible for creating a public nuisance by manufacturing and selling lead-based paint more than 40 years ago.

Cordray’s decision to dismiss the state’s case sends the right message. While the attorney general’s office is committed to protecting consumers, it will not misuse legal doctrines and waste taxpayer dollars on lawsuits the state is unlikely to win. Moreover, in the current economic climate, Ohio’s businesses need to know they will not be hauled into court and have to spend millions of dollars defending against government-sponsored litigation involving legal products they produced several decades ago.”

The Federalist Society just published a special issue of the State Court Docket Watch dedicated to lead paint litigation.  Included in the publication is new article I wrote discussing the Ohio lead paint litigation and placing it in the context of a disturbing trend of government-sponsored public nuisance litigation against manufacturers. It is unclear whether Cordray’s decision to dismiss the lead paint lawsuit is a clean break with this trend or just a reflection of the reality that the state’s case was unlikely to succeed. Regardless, Cordray’s decision to dismiss Ohio’s lead paint case is a hopeful sign for those who are concerned about overzealous use of government-sponsored litigation.

State Rep. Boose

State Rep. Terry Boose, R-Norwalk, recently condemned the raid on Manna Storehouse and insisted that Lorain County General Health District and Ohio Department of Agriculture return the tax records and more than $10,000 in food they took from the Stowers family of LaGrange, Ohio.

The Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law is representing the Stowers in a case against the government agencies for their violent December raid on the family’s food cooperative, and their insistence that operating a private organic food co-op requires a license.

Scott Serazin, the Assistant County Prosecutor who represents the health district, has vowed to continue to illegally detain the Stowers’ family food.  He says they won’t give it back because the Stowers may sell it, even though the food was for the Stowers’ personal consumption.

Boose correctly described the situation as a “case of government gone wild.” We couldn’t agree more. Click here  to learn more about the case.  Click here to read the most recent news.  The Lorain County Prosecutor’s office can be reached at (440) 329-5389. 

An article in the Columbus Dispatch today touched on a few interesting issues. The main point of the article was about how much money the state’s Medicaid program (and, by extension, the state’s taxpayers) could save if the state placed as many people in home and community-based long term care instead of nursing homes. Since nursing homes are far more expensive for most people, it is likely the state could save up to $140 million a year if it just met the national average for home and community-based care.

This is something I’ve written about before. The state should do all it can to ensure that Medicaid dollars (the largest item in the state budget) are being spent in the most cost-effective way possible. The long-term care system is not living up to that standard. But as the Dispatch points out, there is a potential problem in trying to get the state to the national average for home and community-based care: there aren’t enough younger people who would be needed to provide this care. As has been discussed in other contexts, younger people aren’t staying in Ohio nor are they coming to the state. It just isn’t a place that draws people to live in it.

What this points out is that state policymakers are going to have trouble addressing the state’s rising Medicaid spending issues without addressing the more fundamental issues plaguing the state. Reforms like eliminating the income tax, instituting right-to-work legislation, universal vouchers, and the like would make the state an attractive place for younger people. Fixing long-term Medicaid care is important; fixing the underlying issues that are hurting Ohio is even more important.

Rep. Shannon Jones is introducing legislation that would rectify the situation that currently exists in Ohio that allows people with significant assets to collect food stamps. It’s clearly abuse when people who have $80,000 in the bank can collect public benefits. But this points to a larger issue with welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid — how do you determine who is eligible for them?

Most programs mainly focus on income and potential recipients’ assets aren’t generally considered. This is done because some people may have an expensive car or valuable home but not the cash to get by day-to-day. At what point does the government tell people they must use those assets to support themselves? If you are asking the taxpayers to fund your lifestyle, when do they get to tell you when you should start selling some of your assets to support yourself? I think most will agree that if you have cash in the bank, you should spend that on food or medical care before asking the taxpayers to pay for it. But what about other assets? It’s a difficult question for policymakers and it’s inevitable it will be asked once you start establishing welfare programs.

Liberals who support an expanded welfare state need to answer where they would draw the line. Should the wealthy receive welfare?

The Columbus Dispatch reports that almost 98,000 children in Ohio will soon be eligible for government health care when the governor’s plan to extend the program to middle class kids goes into effect on July 1. I don’t think this number tells the whole story, though.

First, a little background: in 2007 policymakers approved an expansion of the state’s children’s health insurance program to cover children who live in families between 200% and 300% of the federal poverty level, or FPL (that’s around $63,000 a year for a family of four). Because of federal action, this expansion will not go into effect until this year.

In anticipation of the new eligibility levels, the Dispatch looked into how many new children would be eligible for the program. The reporter uses data from a new state survey of Ohioans’ health coverage (the data is in pretty rough form and isn’t entirely complete). In that survey, the 98,000 number is the number of uninsured children who live in families below 300% of FPL. And while these children would be eligible for the new government health care program, they are not the only ones who would be eligible. Every child in the state who lives in families that make below 300% of FPL is theoretically eligible for the program, even ones who now have private insurance. By my figuring, that’s 1.73 million Ohio children eligible for government health care out of 2.6 million children in the state.

The numbers given by the state differ substantially from those given by the Census Bureau, which makes comparisons with its data useless. It appears the state will be releasing a full report on this data next month which will hopefully have more useful comparisons. But from what I can tell, over 2/3 of Ohio’s children are now eligible for government health care. And some people still think we have “free market” health care in this nation.

Last week the Ohio House approved Governor Strickland’s transportation budget. There are a lot of problems with this budget. For one, it spends too much. I find it hard to believe we need to be spending $7.6 billion on transportation “needs” when the state is facing such dire fiscal problems. This is exemplified by the governor’s push for reintroduction of passenger rail in the state, which is a dream for social planners but which will drain taxpayer money for years to come. Aside from fiscal issues, there are also policy implications from this bill. Its provisions to allow speed cameras and give police power to stop motorists because they aren’t wearing their seat belts will mean a loss of liberty for Ohioans.

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Ohio Auditor of State Mary Taylor points out that if state laws for local government fiscal transparency were applied to the state itself, she would have to declare the state ‘unauditable’.

It should come as no surprise that the state has exempted itself from the expectations it has of others, and so Auditor Taylor asks of the Strickland Administration:

“How will the governor know where to go fiscally if he doesn’t know where he’s been?”

We second this. And add that while it’s only a matter of managerial competence for the governor to be in the dark about the state’s fiscal condition and future, it concerns the freedom of Ohioans when the electorate cannot learn the truth of the state’s stewardship of their tax dollars.

After all, the kind of government a free people deserve is constitutional, transparent and accountable. Which is to say, a government that is ‘auditable’!

The Ohio House Committee on Housing and Urban Revitalization held a hearing today on HB 3, a bill to “address the current mortgage foreclosure crisis.”  From what we’ve been able to learn (the bill is still in ‘placeholder’ form), the sponsors would effectively ‘nationalize’ in Ohio the private contract between a home loan borrower and lender, even if the Feds were to pass on this. 

We expect the bill to include a mortgage payment moratorium as well as ’cramdown’ provisions where state judges would be given the power to rewrite mortgage provisions. Together these provisions would change the relative situation of debtor and creditor originally established by contract.  By violating the sanctity of the voluntary private contract that structures the utilization of private property in free market economies, these moratoriums and cramdowns would compel creditors to give up value of their private property for political ends. 

Remember: Socialism is a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.  By aquiring control over the contracts that utilize private property, goverment is aquiring control of a means of production and subjecting it to the central planning of politics and politicians.  If HB 3 were to become law with these provisions, it would be a step toward socialism in Ohio.

For more on the mortgage foreclosure issue see our new policy brief by Marc Kilmer.  Marc shows how the proposal not only takes a sledgehammer to one of the central tenets of economic freedom in Ohio, is at the same time unconstitutional, redistributes wealth and opportunity from those who pay their mortgages to those who don’t, and is simply the wrong solution for the wrong problem.

Reason TV has a great video explaining the follies of the auto bailout, why a waitress making $12 an hour shouldn’t be sending tax money to subsidize auto workers who make much higher wages, and why it’s unlikely there would be many jobs lost if domestic auto makers went bankrupt: