SB 5 will help Ohio cut spending

SB 5 will help Ohio cut spending

Senate Bill 5 will be on the ballot in November for the electorate to vote upon. As a supporter of S.B. 5, I welcome that. With all the debt ceiling debate going on in Washington, D.C., it is high time that government spending be addressed. Ohio voters are going to be bombarded with anti-S.B. 5 ads in the coming months. As a voter it is your duty to make sure you can separate fact from fiction.

Not only should you as a voter understand the facts but also look at the results of others that have done something like this in other states. John Kasich and the GOP lead Legislature did not create S.B. 5 out of thin air. They are following the lead of Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana.

Indiana not only replenished its rainy day fund but was able to stave off massive government layoffs this fiscal cycle with an actual budget surplus because Daniels did this 6 years ago.

Scott Walker’s fight in Wisconsin has allowed school districts that were laying off teachers wholesale to go from $400,000 in the red to $1,500,000 in the black overnight. Now those school districts are hiring teachers and reducing class sizes instead of laying off and cutting courses.

Recently Standard and Poor’s upgraded Ohio’s credit forecast from “negative” to “stable,” allowing the state to refinance $417 million of debt at a lower interest rate and to also restructure other debt at a lower rate.

If S.B. 5 had been in place two years ago, East Liverpool School District would have had a savings of over $287,000 on health care costs for employees alone.

Ohio is moving in the right direction and S.B. 5 is critical to that continued positive trend.

Larry Long Jr., East Liverpool