Give the Man a Participation Medal for Eliminating Redundant and Outdated Words

Ohioans, however, deserve far more from a guy who has spent twenty-three years on the public dole becoming a multi-millionaire as Ohio became a dead state walking.

In the category of “when you haven’t got much to brag about,” Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted sent an email to his distribution list on Monday bragging about his (err, I mean, an AI bot’s work) going through the Ohio Administrative Code (OAC) to delete redundant and outdated words. To be clear, the work Husted lauds didn’t result in one regulation being eliminated or any regulatory burden being lightened or removed from Ohioans or their businesses. It literally only resulted in changing a sentence from this:

"I have spent my entire adult life being paid by taxpayers to do very little to earn that pay.”

To this:

“I’m a career politician with no results.”

As you can see, there is no change in the outcome of the sentence (ineffective career politician), but there is a reduction in words from nineteen words to seven words, which is a 63% reduction in the OAC (I’m very talented at streamlining language even without an AI bot to do the work;-) Seriously, it just shows you how few real accomplishments the DeWine-Husted Administration has to talk about that Husted throws this one over the transom.

Unlike my 63% word reduction, however, Husted's AI bot only achieved a 12.6% reduction (nixing 2.2 million words out of 17.4 million words), which means the OAC still contains 15.2 million words that regulate and burden Ohioans and their businesses. Oh, that “work” also took four years to achieve. The big wins pushed to the accommodating “reporter" included eliminating “[t]housands of pages of rules for lottery games that haven't been played in decades” (at 300 words per page, that’s roughly 1.0 million of the 2.2 million words) and “[r]epetitive language that makes it hard to tell where the state's building and fire codes vary from national standards.” If they had more impressive wins, they would have highlighted those wins.

Husted did claim based on “state estimates” that “58,000 hours of labor” will be nixed over the next decade that required in-person interactions with state government. That sounds like a big win, right? The problem is he didn’t indicate whose labor is being saved—state workers or Ohioans dealing with state workers. Applying basic math to the claim if it is the latter, Husted’s claim means that, on an annual basis, 5,800 hours of labor will go away, or 22.3 hours per day over 260 work-days. That works out to 1,338 minutes per day for Ohio’s 4.85 million private sector workers, or .0003 seconds per worker. The savings are even more minuscule if you add in all of the non-working Ohioans who also interact with state government every day (i.e., DMV, Medicaid recipients, taxpayers, etc.). 

This “big win” makes for a powerful State of the State address:

“…

And so while Ohio’s job growth is tepid, it’s population is shrinking, and your taxes remain too high, we are working tirelessly to eliminate lottery administrative code words on games no longer being played and repetitive verbiage that confuses people as to whether or not Ohio’s building codes match national standards.

…”

Very inspiring stuff, but a bit below the strong case as to why Husted should become governor in 2027. At this point, he at most deserves a participation medal. Ohioans, however, deserve far more from a guy who has spent twenty-three years on the public dole becoming a multi-millionaire as Ohio became a dead state walking. Let’s hope something stirs the DeWine-Husted Administration to use the Republican supermajority in the legislature to do something truly big in the next three years like enacting right-to-work, eliminating the state income tax, or breaking ground on a world-class airport. 

P.S. Thanks to the intrepid work of conservative groups, we now know why Joe Biden suddenly thinks he can win Florida in November. It appears he has secretly flown over 160,000 illegal immigrants to Florida cities over the last three years who he expects will figure a way via left-wing groups to vote. Hopefully  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will again thwart these plans. To win Michigan, Biden wants to start flying in refugees from Gaza under rules that would give them a shortened pathway to citizenship. I can’t think of a more reckless idea than bringing a group of people to America who (1) hate America and (2) have been indoctrinated since birth to hate Jews with every fiber of their being (they also aren’t very tolerant of the LGBTQ population). The absolute last thing America needs to do is to import an intifada to our shores. Biden’s desperation is an excellent example of how living by the sword of identity politics (appeasing Arab-American voters in Dearborn, Michigan) results in dying by the sword of identity politics (by sacrificing Jewish-Americans and LGBTQ-Americans—the latter get thrown off roofs in Iran so the Mullahs can claim there are no LGBTQs there). Hopefully, Jews and LGBTQ folks will wake up to what the Left has become before it is too late, as October 7 graphically showed what these fanatics are capable of. Finally, see my tweet below from yesterday showing the utter ignorance being displayed by America’s “best and brightest."