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| DEBT CLOCK: Ohio Gov. John Kasich rolled out his presidential platform in front of a debt counter that’s spinning faster because of his Obamacare expansion |
Photo: C-SPAN
Ohio Gov. John
Kasich, who has spent the past four years growing government, is trying to
rebrand himself as a small-government reformer.
The Kasich Action Plan, which his presidential
campaign released Thursday, emphasizes balancing the federal budget. Kasich
plans to accomplish this by shifting education, welfare and infrastructure
programs to the states.
Tailored to draw
support from fans of his House Budget Committee chairmanship in the 1990s, the
plan would attempt to spur job growth by cutting income tax rates and
simplifying the tax code.
Chris Edwards, the
libertarian Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, told Ohio
Watchdog.org the Kasich Action Plan would be more compelling if not for Kasich’s record as governor.
While Kasich calls
for reducing the number of federal income tax brackets from seven to three via
legislation he will propose within his first 100 days as president, Ohio still
has nine income tax brackets.
“The plan sounds
very fiscally conservative, but Kasich’s been a big spender in Ohio,” Edwards
said. “We gave him a grade of D on the last Cato report card. He’s a pretty
good tax-cutter, but general fund Ohio spending has gone up 35 percent since
he’s been in office.”
Kasich increased
Ohio’s General Revenue Fund spending by $4.6 billion in his first two biennial
budgets, with spending growth accelerating each year.
“When he was in
Congress, he was great. He was very much a fiscal conservative,” Edwards said
before noting Ohio’s Medicaid costs “are soaring” because of Kasich’s embrace
of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
“In Ohio we reined
in Medicaid costs,” Kasich wrote in a Washington Post op-ed
Thursday. But his Obamacare expansion has made Ohio more reliant on federal
spending, which he promises to cut as president.
Kasich increased
Medicaid spending 33 percent during his first term — driven by more than $4
billion in Obamacare expansion money in 18 months.
Ohio’s total
Medicaid spending was $17.7 billion when Kasich took office; it was $23.5
billion in the 2015 fiscal year ending in June. Due to Obamacare expansion,
Ohio’s Medicaid costs are expected to hit $28.2 billion by 2017.
“Education is a
local issue,” Kasich wrote in his op-ed. “We need high standards, but they are
not Washington’s business.”
Kasich supports the
federally backed Common Core State Standards Initiative, and he opposes an Ohio House proposal to allow local
school boards to opt out of using Common Core math and language arts standards.
“If we want to get
serious about economic growth, we need less government and more ‘us,'” the
governor asserted in his Washington Post column. Four years after the creation
of Kasich’s taxpayer-funded JobsOhio, Ohio’s job growth ranks in the bottom 10 nationally.
At the Kasich
Action Plan unveiling in Nashua, New Hampshire, Kasich stressed the importance
of leadership — a theme he revisits each time Republicans in the Ohio General
Assembly resist his policies.
“We need to come
together to do what’s in the best interest of our country: Lead. Sometimes it’s
lonely,” Kasich said on Thursday.
“Lead.”
“I’ve never been
uncomfortable with traveling a lonely road. I think that’s what leaders do,” Kasich said in April 2012,
when he began pushing for higher severance taxes on oil and natural gas
drilling.
In addition to
fighting for a severance tax hike, the Republican governor has fought Republican legislative supermajorities
for increases in the state Commercial Activity Tax, sales tax and tobacco tax.
“I’m a change
agent, and when you’re a change agent you just expect to walk a lonely road at
times,” Kasich said after the Ohio
House stripped Obamacare expansion from his budget in 2013.
Teasing the Kasich
Action Plan’s release in a Wednesday interview with Chuck Todd
on MSNBC, Kasich lamented the idea that politicians “all want to spend.”
Kasich said
President George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress “blew a $5 trillion
surplus” at the turn of the century because of a “lack of leadership.”
“It happened
because, frankly, they weren’t vetoing enough stuff,” Kasich said, because
“they just didn’t care that much about spending, because when you stand up on
spending, and you block programs, you make people angry.”
In 2013, Kasich
vetoed the Ohio General Assembly’s ban on implementing Obamacare expansion and
then expanded the program without legislative approval.
Kasich had said Medicaid expansion would
“stick states with large and unsustainable costs” — in the end, he did exactly as President Obama and hospital lobbyists
wanted.
The governor’s
office did not respond to requests for comment about the conflicts between his
record and his presidential campaign proposals.
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