BuckeyeBlog

I couldn’t let this quote from Wellesley economist Chip Case slip by:

“The government has got to do something.”

I remember as a student at Michigan that some group or another had a sit-in at the president’s office. They left when he promised, quote, to do something, end quote, about their issue.

This is poor journalism on NPR’s part. It’s one thing to assemble quotes, but they ought to be fair, in context and meaningful.

Okay, now I’m afraid.

While Marc Dann was copping a feel, er, plea, the real news was a few blocks north at the Arena Grand movie theater, where about 400 people in pretty expensive suits were discussing Managing a Changing Climate: Challenges and Opportunities for the Buckeye State.

The entire political, industrial, legal and accounting world is planning on moving forward with laws that could readily rewrite the world, including plans for a Carbon Market Efficiency Board.

If we’re lucky, the board would act like the Federal Reserve and would do relatively few things; basically, establish a gross amount of carbon pollution, if pollution it be, and thereby enable trading in the right to emit the stuff. Of course, the sense of that depends upon whether it is sensible to consider carbon a pollutant. Apparently the real tragedy of the commons is that everything is capturable now.

But we won’t be so lucky as to have such a board merely establishing property rights. Instead we’re going to get politicians playing Lilliput, tying us down until we can’t emit.

And meanwhile, they’ll be jetting around the world collecting awards for it.

Cheers to 19 state representatives who have proposed to eliminate altogether Ohio’s individual income tax, applicable also to trusts and estates.

No committee assignment yet and no formal analysis of the bill has been prepared by the Legislative Service Commission — a dollar says those things won’t happen — but credit is due to these 19 leaders. It’s the biggest free-market idea out of the Ohio General Assembly since vouchers.

The honor roll:

John Adams, R-Sidney

Thom Collier, R-Mount Vernon

Arlene Setzer, R-Vandalia

Jeff Wagner, R-Sycamore

Tom Brinkman, R-Cincinnati

Matt Dolan, R-Novelty

Matt Huffman, R-Lima

Diana Fessler, R-Bethel Township

James Zehringer, R-Mercer County

Bruce Goodwin, R-Defiance

Kevin Bacon, R-Minerva Park

Courtney Combs, R-Hamilton

William Batchelder, R-Medina

Jay Hottinger, R-Newark

Cliff Hite, R-Findlay

Joseph Uecker, R-Miami Township

Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon

John Widowfield, R-Cuyahoga Falls

Bill Coley, R-Liberty Township

While you’ll not often find me praising Governor Ted Strickland, it seems he has done something that is worth at least lukewarm praise. In light of calls to raise tobacco taxes, the Governor has indicated that he won’t be supporting any measures to increase taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. As I wrote about here, there is no reason to increase tobacco taxes even further. Tobacco users already pay a disproportionate amount in taxes and it is simply bad policy to further target these users to pay for government services.

Of course, I can’t be too generous to the Governor because the current tobacco tax issue is tied in with his plan to raid the tobacco settlement fund to pay for his economic development boondoggle. There are so many issues involved here that should anger any fan of small government (the notion of a state foundation to battle tobacco use is ridiculous as is the idea that it is proper for the government to try and stimulate the economy through borrowing money) that no one involved in this issue has clean hands. But the Governor does deserve credit for resisting calls to increase tobacco taxes.

The latest “stimulus” plan from the Strickland Administration proposed taking ‘excess revenues’ (oh, what wonderful doublespeak!) from the Turnpike and spending on things like historical building renovation and corporate welfare enticements to Ohio businesses to hire more interns.

We’ve written about leasing the Turnpike (here and here) the $6 billion of dollars it could put into the Ohio economy stimulating growth though both direct expecture flows but also through the windfall of true infrastructure investments.

Instead of paying interest on bonds, the state would be collecting interest from a private Turnpike operator.

Now that’s a better idea!