Gov. Strickland's State of the State

Gov. Ted Strickland delivered a one-hour State of the State message today in the House Chambers at the Statehouse. I shall leave it to the print and broadcast media to report on the specifics, but will offer a few personal impressions.

One reason I have generally liked Gov. Strickland has been his vision. While I have a few disagreements with the way the vision has been executed, he deserves much credit for consistently pursuing and clearly articulating his vision for the State of Ohio. Today's speech focused on the challenge of increasing Ohio's employment. Gov. Strickland emphasized that the work of his administration to date has been to lay the infrastructure for future economic growth. He cited numerous special funds and public-private partnerships to build Ohio's renewable energy industry, provide venture capital and training for startup businesses, encourage insourcing to provide jobs for Ohioans, and to increase the market share of Ohio-grown farm products within Ohio. He also is working on the creation of university-private partnerships to help Ohio firms develop innovative products to fuel future economic growth.

He touched on the budgetary issues by noting that the personal property tax remains unfriendly to business growth, especially in the energy sector; university tuitions have increased more slowly in Ohio than in any other state; regulatory reforms have reduced the cost and business-unfriendliness of state government, and that Ohio has 5,021 fewer state employees than at the beginning of his term (January 2007).

The Governor and the General Assembly have the right priorities, and to their credit have aggressively pursued long-term goals, at a time when it would have been very easy to cut back to concentrate on immediate needs. That strategy might work in some states, but Ohio has had so much economic recession for so long, that pursuing a vision like this one is imperative if Ohioans are going to have opportunities in the future.

My greatest objection to his speech lies in the plethora of new programs he has devised to create these public-private partnerships and to foster access to venture capital. Today, these may seem like good ideas, and there is a fair chance that they will work; but he is creating a complex system that will be an administrative nightmare a few years from now.

Now, Gov. Strickland and the General Assembly need to keep an eye on Washington. It is fair to say that federal regulatory policy creates so much overhead on state governments, that it is the primary reason 49 of the 50 states are having difficulty balancing their budgets. At the same time, Washington and Columbus are beginning to work to cross-purposes. While Ohio wants to foster entrepreneurship, the feds want to increase governmental control over the private sector. The time will soon come when fiscal considerations will force us to choose between Ohio's clearly common-sense approach to economic development, and the District of Coercion's ideological approach.

We need to begin freeing Ohio's financial sector from the manipulations of New York. This can be accomplished in two ways: by enabling the use of gold and silver coin in payment of taxes and other transactions, which will help protect us from inflation of the U.S. dollar, and by creating a state bank modeled on North Dakota's to partner with local banks to provide those low-cost loans to entrepreneurs. Both actions will also contribute to a sound currency following Ohio's independence, in the event secession become necessary. By following this approach, which is part of The Ohio Republic's legislative program, he could achieve the goals of his public-private partnerships more simply and much more effectively.