He traced these facts to a difference in tax policies. Florida had lower taxes and, most specifically, no state income tax.
Listening to him, one thought, really? You want to compare Ohio to Florida? Not Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania or New York, but Florida?
You think that when people leave Ohio for Florida, the reason must be taxes?
Maybe ideologues are impervious to weather.
After 2006, the Florida economy collapsed. It collapsed sooner and harder than economies elsewhere. All of a sudden, property couldn’t be sold and jobs couldn’t be found.
At right-wing think tanks across the country, interns were told to find out who had raised taxes in Florida. Or so one presumes.
Now there’s another candidate for governor with a favorite state. John Kasich likes Indiana, or, more precisely, its governor, Mitch Daniels, a fellow Republican. In making his case for lower taxes and less regulation, Kasich talks about how much better things are going in Indiana because of smart policies there.
Daniels has emerged as a favorite on the political right, even getting talked about for president. He was first elected in 2004. The state had had a string of unbalanced budgets. Daniels, with a combination of cutbacks, efficiency measures, tax cuts and tax increases, brought the budget into balance and even created a surplus. When other states went into the red quickly after the 2008 collapse of the economy, Indiana didn’t.
He was re-elected in 2008 by 18 percentage points, while Barack Obama was becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state in decades.
On top of all that, there has been some statistical and anecdotal evidence that businesses are choosing Indiana, and that it is one state in the region that is actually growing.
So at least Kasich’s selection of a role model has a stronger logic than Blackwell’s.
But some statistics cited in Daniels’ favor are kind of like the one about Ohio being named — over and over, under various governors — by a magazine called Site Selection as the national leader in the number of businesses moving here. You know there’s something wrong with that stat even if you don’t know quite what it is.
Sometimes Indiana is identified as a state whose unemployment rate has gone down during a particular period, when most states have seen a rise. And at certain stage this year, Indiana was claiming to lead the country in job creation, seeing 7 percent of the new jobs this year, despite having only 2 percent of the population. (Actually, Ohio led the nation in jobs created for one month this year.)
In the big picture, though, things look different. Take taxes. An organization called the Tax Foundation notes that Indiana is Ohio’s only neighbor that has higher taxes than Ohio, when you combine state and local.
Or take jobs. In June, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 10.6 percent, Ohio’s 10.5, though Indiana used to have a lower rate.
A lot of people think the unemployment rate doesn’t tell you much. So the Brookings Institution think tank decided to simply ask how many people are working?
It found that between late 2007 and mid-2010, the percentage of Hoosiers working dropped from 63.5 percent to 57.2. That was the sixth biggest drop among states, and bigger than any state in the Midwest.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that Indiana has lost 5.8 percent of its jobs since early 2007, compared to Ohio’s 7 percent.
The top of Kasich’s website has a running count of Ohio jobs lost on Gov. Ted Strickland’s watch. The number is the cornerstone of his attack on Strickland, who took office in early 2007.
Somebody running against Daniels could have the same kind of counter.
Ohio’s search for a state continues.
Martin Gottlieb writes for the Dayton Daily News. Contact him at (937) 225-2288 or by e-mail at mgottlieb@DaytonDailyNews.com.