With an $851 million dollar gap persisting in the two-year budget, Senate Republicans have been slammed from all corners of the political and journalistic spectrum over the past week for their handling of the crisis.
Further, Republican-friendly groups like the Ohio Business Roundtable, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio Manufacturers Association have all endorsed Governor Strickland’s plan to end a tax cut a few months early.
Or as The Columbus Dispatch’s Joe Hallett asserts:
Strickland pushed through the Democrat-dominated House a bill that rescinds the final 4.2 percent of the five-year, 21 percent income tax cut enacted by Republicans and effective in 2005. Currently, the full 21 percent means that an Ohio family of four earning $60,000 would pay $1,389 in state income tax this year, according to the Ohio Department of Taxation.
That same family would pay $78 more a year, or $1,467, if the 4.2 percent is rescinded as Strickland wants. It would be $1,445, or $56 more a year, under the Senate plan — meaning the debate is over $22.
Considering that the alternative is further cuts for schools, colleges, poor children, the mentally ill and others in need, asking that family to pay $78 more a year seems to be a reasonable request.
Major business groups, education leaders, social-service advocates and newspaper editorial boards have concluded as much. But not Senate Republicans. In their single-minded quest to avoid the wrath of their conservative base, they proposed a cockamamie alternative that still raised taxes, further punished the poor and threatened to despoil the environment.
And when only a half-dozen of the 21 GOP senators said they would vote for their own alternative, they blamed Strickland and the 12 Senate Democrats for killing it and abruptly bolted Columbus until December, leaving the budget and all who depend on it in limbo.
The usually thoughtful Sen. Jon Husted embarrassed himself by blaming the GOP’s failure on Strickland’s “schizophrenic leadership.”
And Sen. Tom Niehaus, No. 2 Republican leader, said a budget solution “is out of our hands now,” contending that “it’s up to the governor” to come up with an alternative.
Strickland has offered one.
The Akron Beacon-Journal has noted its disappointment in Senate Republicans, too, while signaling approval of Governor Strickland’s leadership on this issue.
The Republican majority in the Ohio Senate has expanded on the concept of a ”do nothing” legislature. The state budget has been a topic of much intense conversation the past 10 months, and yet Senate Republicans still have not put forward a complete or credible proposal. On Wednesday, they attempted to pose as responsible lawmakers, describing as a fair compromise their plan to close an $851 million hole in the state budget. One problem? Not enough Republicans or Democrats were willing to support the plan.
And now Bill Harris, the Senate president, and his crew appear intent on kicking the work into next month. Never mind that Gov. Ted Strickland and House Democrats crafted a reasonable approach, postponing the final phase of a 21 percent reduction in individual income tax rates. Ohioans still would enjoy a 16.8 percent tax cut since 2004.
This political gamesmanship being played was identified by The Columbus Dispatch in an editorial Sunday:
Republicans’ real game — drawing out the budget mess to hurt Democrats, especially Gov. Ted Strickland, in next year’s election — is clear in the cynical remarks of Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, who gloated about the damage the impasse will do to the other side of the aisle.
He told the Gongwer News Service that, if Democrats wouldn’t support the compromise bill, which wasn’t even supported by Republicans, “then come Dec. 31, the education governor gets to cut public schools by 10 percent.”
Now senators will not get back to work until Dec. 1. Meanwhile, the Department of Taxation has to print and distribute income-tax booklets by the end of the year. And state agencies, nearly five months into the two-year budget cycle, need to know how much they’re going to have.
That the “compromise” included delaying two-thirds of the tax cut is an acknowledgment that the budget hole can’t be plugged without taking this step.
