Ohio's Middle Class Suffering Under Kasich

The Youngstown Vindicator has an opinion piece from Ed Fitzgerald, Democratic candidate for Ohio governor. Ed Fitzgerald explains how Republican Gov. John Kasich has hurt the middle class.

Vindy:

...Here’s the real story: John Kasich inherited a recovery that began a full year before he took office. In that year, Ohio’s unemployment rate fell by a full point and a half, from 10.6 to 9 percent. Since then, Ohio’s recovery has slowed as newly regressive policies that squeeze the middle class have taken effect. On the governor’s first day in office, Ohio ranked 29th in annual job growth as measured by Arizona State University’s Carey School of Business. Today, we’re 46th in the nation in job growth and a greater percentage of Ohioans have given up looking for work than at any point in the past 30 years. Clearly, the state is not headed in the right direction.

But even as Ohio falls behind, there’s one group of Ohioans whose interests are being taken care of by this governor: the wealthy and well-connected. If ever this tendency of the governor to reward the rich was on full display, it was in his recently enacted biennial budget. The governor has gone to great pains to label this a tax cut for everyone, but as ever, the devil is in the details. In this case, while the wealthiest Ohioans will, on average, receive a $6,000 handout under the governor’s tax plan, middle-class individuals earning about $50,000 a year will see about $9 — not quite enough to buy a pizza. Truly not all tax cuts are created equal....

....Under this governor, they’re also getting less in return, particularly when it comes to education and public safety. And now, over a quarter of Ohio school districts stand to receive less state funding than they did during the last school year, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer....

Ohio is 46th in job growth? OMG! Kasich has really made a mess.


> Kasich has apparently not made all his appointments.  It appears that he has been lagging behind in filling 9 jobs in the area of tourism, according to an AP story at the ReviewOnline.

> The CantonRepository has an editorial that suggests that Debe Terhar step down as President of the Ohio School Board:

...At a board meeting Tuesday, Terhar said that Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s first novel, “Bluest Eyes,” is “totally inappropriate” for a suggested reading list for high school students. According to The Columbus Dispatch, Terhar told board members: “I don’t want my grandchildren reading it, and I don’t want anyone else’s children reading it. It should not be used in any school for any Ohio K-12 child. If you want to use it in college somewhere, that’s fine.”

...Whether one agrees with her about the book or not (and we don’t), how can this possibly be dismissed as only a personal opinion, on par with that of, say, a parent or student? What part of Terhar’s own words — “It should not be used in any school for any Ohio K-12 child” — spoken during a meeting of a board that makes curriculum decisions for Ohio’s public schools, does she not understand?

The book dispute comes on the heels of a January controversy about Terhar’s
Facebook posting that implicitly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler. She first defended the post, then apologized for it, calling it “an error in judgment.”

Terhar just doesn't seem to understand the purpose of reading and discussing a book in a school setting. As a matter of fact, there appears to be a lot of stuff that Terhar just doesn't get. Debe Terhar is another one of Kasich's appointments that shows his own poor judgement.