Gov. Kasich talks taxes in year-end review

First of a three-part series

By MARC KOVAC

news@vindy.com

COLUMBUS

It was less than three minutes into his year-end review that Gov. John Kasich focused his

attention on taxes.

He touted cuts implemented since he took office five years ago, including provisions in the last biennial budget phasing out taxes on small-business income up to $250,000 and instituting an across-the-board 6.3 percent reduction for all brackets.

But the governor said more needs to be done to shift Ohio away from its reliance on income taxes to a system that taxes consumption.

“We killed the income tax for small business,” he said. “We have to lower the income tax more. With income taxes high, people just kind of look the other way. ... We are going to continue on tax reform. We have to tax consumption and reduce [taxation of] risk taking, investment and job creation. That’s the way it has to be, so we’re going to continue to push for that.”

He added, “We have to lead on this, because the lower that income tax, the better we do.”

Kasich offered the comments during a speech before an audience of cabinet and chamber of commerce members in his suburban Columbus hometown of Westerville, where he was joined by legislative leaders and others in recapping the past year’s accomplishments.

Here are five more things Kasich said during his year-end review:

Ohio’s economic status

“Ohio has grown in the last five years,” he said. “We are up 385,000 jobs. ... That’s really pretty remarkable. We also know that our wages are growing faster than the national average, and you might ask why. Sometimes I’m amazed that we don’t always learn lessons, because we’re structurally balanced. Our budget is in excellent shape. There are many states in this country where they can’t seem to get it done, and we get it done because we’re not going to settle for anything other than a stronger budget, because without it businesses aren’t coming here. We’re running a $2 billion surplus. Pretty remarkable. That sends additional messages to job creators about the fact that we know what the heck we’re doing. And we’ve also cut these taxes by nearly $5 billion, more than any state that I can think of in the country.”

Economic development

Kasich praised JobsOhio, the nonprofit that spearheads the state’s economic development efforts, and a handful of business projects that will boost Ohio’s workforce numbers in coming years.

The list includes Amazon, which is building in suburban Columbus; Fuyao Glass America, which is establishing operations in the Dayton area; and PTT Global Chemical, which is studying the feasibility of an ethane cracker facility in Belmont County.

Job training

“It’s one of the most-boring things to think about, but it’s one of the most-important things to get things advanced,” Kasich said. “If you don’t have a workforce, they’re not coming. I was ... down in Lima, I think it was where I asked a guy, I said, ‘How’s it going?’ He said, ‘We have 100 job openings but we don’t have anybody to go to work. Nobody’s skilled.’ I said that’s where we use the community colleges to train people. We’ll get it done. By the way, we’re telling kids about jobs so that they’re not going to school in a vacuum. They’re not going to school just to go to school. They’re starting to realize that they can get a job, and more and more kids are looking at the OhioMeansJobs.com site and what these jobs pay and how you get one. It’s cool, and we’re pushing that all the way through not only K-12 but higher ed.”

Schools

Kasich praised the charter-school reform package passed by lawmakers, which is aimed at addressing failing charters and their sponsors.

“It’s some of the toughest charter-school reform in the country,” he said. “We don’t want bad charter schools. We don’t want bad public schools. Maybe we ought to spend a little time thinking about them as well.”

Addiction

“The drug problem is just horrible,” Kasich said. “We’ve been fighting it for six years. Other people are waking up to it now. We’ve shut down pill mills. We’ve busted drug dealers – we have the biggest hauls ever in the history of the highway patrol. We do not permit the doctor shopping. We are not permitting you go from emergency room to emergency room. Now we have protocols on both chronic and acute drugs ... and we have a connection to the pharmacy board so that we can tell who’s not following prescribing guidelines. The writing of prescriptions has declined, but we’ve got this unbelievable drug called fentanyl, which we have experienced here as the tip of the spear and it’s spreading across the country. We’re working on tightening all of that, and I believe that the reporting to the pharmacy board along with the Start Talking [program] in the schools, and we need more schools to participate. We’ve got to win this. I think we’re making progress, but the statistics are grim. We just keep at it.”