The Weekly Standard has a great article about how government employee unions are contributing to state budget problems. It points out the generous compensation government workers receive, courtesy of your tax dollars:
For every $1-an-hour pay increase, noted Dennis Cauchon in USA Today, public employees have gotten $1.17 in new benefits. Private workers have gotten just .58 cents in benefits for every $1 raise. This gap worries left-liberal labor economist Barry Bluestone. The price of state and local public services increased by 41 percent nationally between 2000 and 2008. Private services only increased by 27 percent. The benefit growth has continued unabated into the Great Recession, and Bluestone says the gap will inevitably produce a backlash.
The rising compensation of state government workers in Ohio has contributed significantly to the current state budget problems, as I wrote about here.
It seems some government officials can’t take “no” for an answer. Several school districts in the Cincinnati area are seeking voter approval to raise taxes after being rebuffed in the recent past. Two districts’ pleas have been rejected three times, another district’s requests have been voted down twice.
As in the past, school district officials say there will be dire consequences if the levies fail. Of course, these levies failed in the past and it still seems these districts have managed to keep their doors open.
These discricts will certainly have less revenue than school district officials desire. The threat to stop sports programs or shut down clubs if taxes aren’t raised is a reaction to poor planning in the past. As I wrote about here, on the state level much of the budget problem can be attributed to the growth in size of state government employment as well as the increase in pay to state workers. While I haven’t crunched the numbers, I suspect something similar is going on in these school districts.
The fiscal problems being experienced there should serve as an incentive for the districts to look at their hiring practices, how much they pay employees, and how much employees contribute to their pensions and health care. Real savings could be found in these areas, I imagine. A little foresight could prevent a repeat of these troubles during the next recession.
After nearly a year of waiting the Stowers family from LaGrange, Ohio will finally have their food returned to them from Ohio Department of Agriculture and the Lorain County General Health District. The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law won a court order for all of the food that was seized back in December of 2008 to be returned to the Stowers within two weeks.
According to the Ohio Department of Agriculture and the Lorain County General Health District the food has been properly stored in freezers, therefore should still be edible. If the food is determined to not be edible the Stowers will seek compensation. The fight in court will continue later this month when the rest of the case is decided. The complete story can be viewed here.
Governor Ted Strickland announced a plan to freeze this years income tax last week; something he is now saying is not a tax increase. Strickland views the tax cut freeze as a feasible way to get the budget in order. President of the Buckeye Insitute, Matt Mayer, thinks there are other options that can be explored. Mayer shared his ideas with Ohio News Network earlier this week in Impact of Tax Cut Freeze Debated.
The trial scheduled tomorrow morning for the MannaStorehouse case (Stowers v. Ohio Department of Agriculture) is being rescheduled. The trial court has moved the trial date and will announce the new date tomorrow morning. The move is being made by the trial court on their own accord. As soon as the date is released it will be posted on the Buckeye Blog.
In a Viewpoint I wrote a little while ago, I raised a concern about the burden the health care legislation making its way through Congress would impose on state taxpayers. While health insurance regulation and Medicare are receiving the bulk of the attention in this debate, all the legislation passed by House and Senate committees contain expansions of Medicaid, which pays for the health care of the poor and near-poor. Medicaid is a joint state/federal program and it is a significant portion of the state budget. Expanding this program will cost state taxpayers dearly.
The Columbus Dispatch has a story today about just how much that cost may be:
As Ohio officials try to close an $850 million budget hole, the key U.S. Senate health-care overhaul package could cost Ohio $922 million in additional Medicaid spending in the plan’s first five years.
Taxpayers should note that this figure was calculated using the assumption the federal government would pay 95% of the cost of the newly-expanded Medicaid. Currently the federal government pays 60% of Ohio’s Medicaid cost. It is highly unlikely that the feds will shoulder 95% of the cost in the final bill or, if they do, that this number will last more than a few years.
Ohio taxpayers should be aware of just how expensive this health care “reform” legislation will be to them not only at the federal level, but also at the state level.
On Saturday October 3, the owners of Moto Verde, a motor scooter shop in Fairfax, Ohio, will exercise their constitutional rights by opening their business to the general public. Back in June, Moto Verde owners Tim Annett and Ryan Haines thought their own version of the American Dream, running a motor scooter shop, was over.
The Village of Fairfax labeled them an “automobile dealership” and made it clear that Tim and Ryan wasn’t “open for business” to them. This despite Fairfax’s struggling economy, and statewide employment rate hovering around ten percent. Some conjectured that Fairfax was trying to keep the storefronts on its main street vacant, in case a big box retailer that would provide more tax revenue wanted to move in.
Annett and Haines were shocked, since their business did not have the “open lot” that qualifies a business as an automobile dealership. The two men through their property rights were being violated, and contacted Maurice Thompson, the Director for the 1851 Center.
Thompson found that Fairfax’s regulations did in fact violate Tim and Ryan’s rights to their property, their right to earn an honest living, and their due process rights.
The 1851 Center sent a threat of litigation to the Mayor of Fairfax and the Village Building Official in July. After receiving the letter, Fairfax officials agreed to allow Moto Verde to open its doors for business. Having jumped through its final regulatory hurdles, Moto Verde’s Grand Opening is Saturday October 3.
The 1851 Center sent a threat of litigation to the Mayor of Fairfax and the Village Building Official in late June of this year. After receiving the letter, Fairfax officials made the decision to let Motor Verde open their doors and revoked the previous classification of the business as an “Automotive Sales Area.”
“If a corporation pays for something political, the government can ban it” — that’s Buckeye Institute Board member Bradley Smith summarizing current campaign law as viewed by federal regulators. Having been a member of the Federal Election Commission, Smith is something of an expert on this topic. As he points out, this view about what can be banned doesn’t just apply to advertisements or pamphlets or other kinds of traditional political speech. It also applies to books (almost all of which are, after all, published by corporations), as the current Solicitor General stated before the Supreme Court earlier this year.
Smith spoke at the Cato Institute on this topic and gave a good summary of the dangers this view poses to every American’s right to speak freely:
Yesterday Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood came to Ohio to extol the virtues of passenger rail. I hope he offered something in his talk that was more insightful than his comments as reported in the Dispatch: “if you build it, they will come” and “people like to ride trains.”
His platitudes are not only lame but they are also wrong. If you build it, they may come to the train station, but they won’t ride it unless taxpayers pay the majority of their ticket price and fully subsidize the initial start up costs. And, yes, people like to ride trains. They just don’t want to pay the full cost to do so.
I have nothing against train travel. As I explain here, I just don’t want taxpayers to subsidize it.
