Governor Kasich: We Reduced The Biggest Deficit In State History To Zero and Lowered Taxes For Everyone

Kasich is one of the more unpopular governors in the country, with a 35% approval rate, and 50% disapproving.

But he just balanced the budget -- having inherited an $8 billion deficit, the largest in the history of Ohio -- so maybe this will help some. (Video below the fold, or at that link.)

Ohio leans Republican. It shows the magnitude of the political problem we face when even a Republican-leaning state gets all crankypants about actual cuts, which they claim they want.

But he's put fiscal discipline into practice and has only been in office since January. Assuming this creates a better condition for job creation, he just might see those numbers reversing.

Red States Clawing Way Out of Recession: This should help Kasich, too. The article is about job creation in several red states (and newly red states, like Michigan), but I'll highlight the Ohio bit.

Led by Governor John Kasich, Ohio’s January-June seasonally adjusted jobs pickup is the Buckeye State’s best performance since 1994. Not coincidentally, that’s about when then-Governor George Voinovich stopped being even sort of conservative. Regardless of the party in charge, Ohio was governed like a blue state until Kasich came along. Even more impressive, in terms of what has actually occurred (i.e., the not seasonally adjusted figures), the state has added just over 200,000 private-sector jobs in the past five months, the best February-June total since 1999, when the national economy, largely due to Kasich’s previous work on the federal budget as a congressman, was far stronger.

In March, Kasich and the General Assembly tentatively won a bitter battle with the state’s public-sector unions and passed “SB5.” As I noted several weeks ago, SB5 prohibits public employee strikes, limits the subjects of collective bargaining, requires public employees to pay 15% of their health insurance costs, and prohibits forced union “contributions” by nonunion public workers. In June, the governor signed a two-year budget which closed a projected $8 billion deficit dumped on the state by predecessor Ted Strickland without raising taxes and while keeping all-funds spending virtually flat. The Buckeye State reaped an almost immediate reward: Standard & Poor’s, which had downgraded the state’s debt rating just as Strickland departed in January, revised it to “stable” shortly after the budget’s passage.

Something to bear in mind.

posted by Ace at 01:55 PM

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