Time to Stop the Jobs Insanity in Ohio
JobsOhio, Mike DeWine, Jon Husted, and Ohio’s Supermajority Legislature Owe Ohioans and Their Businesses an Apology
I know Establishment politicians and the bureaucrats making far more money than they are worth hate what I have to say about JobsOhio’s effectiveness and the failed tenures of John Kasich-Mary Taylor and Mike DeWine-Jon Husted, but the facts on Ohio’s private sector job growth over the last twelve years are irrefutable and damn ugly.
If you remember when Kasich launched JobsOhio, he promoted it as the greatest economic development tool in the world that would propel Ohio’s jobs economy to the head of the pack. Kasich lectured those of us who oppose having government pick winners and losers via billion-dollar handouts as luddites and cranks. After twelve years and billions spent by JobsOhio, we have enough data to assess whether Kasich was right or wrong.
The answer: as with so many things he did (expanding Medicaid, pushing to tax energy production, opposing right-to-work, etc.), Kasich wasn’t only wrong, he was unequivocally and epically wrong to the enormous detriment of Ohioans and their businesses.
The frustrating aspect of Kasich’s and JobOhio’s massive, demonstrated failures isn’t that THEY got it wrong; rather, the maddening part is that the DeWine-Husted Administration and Ohio’s supermajority Republican legislature have done absolutely nothing to tweak, let alone eliminate, JobsOhio in the face of twelve-years worth of data. One has to wonder how much more failure has to occur before JobsOhio is held accountable. To boot, Ohio’s print, radio, and television media have utterly refused to dig into the issue and ask the tough questions. Instead, they parrot the talking points on Intel, which is a company deep crisis hemorrhaging cash and market share. Intel will desperately take the $2.1 billion Ohio offered them to come here.
At the most basic level, above is a table showing Ohio’s private sector job growth annually since JobsOhio’s creation. You’ll notice two troubling trends. First, from 2012 to 2019 before DeWine-Husted shut down Ohio’s economy for the COVID pandemic, the longer JobsOhio was throwing money around, Ohio’s annual private sector job growth got WEAKER, not stronger, with less than 30,000 net jobs added in 2018 and 2019. One would and should expect that the longer JobsOhio was doing its secretive “magic,” Ohio’s private sector would, as Kasich promised, lead America. Instead, Ohio’s private sector remained mired in mediocrity, with a ranking of 35th from 2011 to the present.
The second troubling trend you’ll notice is Ohio’s recovery from the pandemic also has gotten weaker as the years have worn on. After losing 250,300 jobs in 2020 from the DeWine-Husted shutdown, Ohio’s recovery in the last few months of 2020 got off to a middling start as companies restarted operations and began to bring back workers. That 31st ranking, however, slid over the next two-and-a-quarter years to 34th in 2021, 39th in 2022, and 40th so far in 2023, as companies continued to bring back workers. In over three years, Ohio hasn’t netted a single private sector job since 2019, as it still has to recover 5,900 jobs before getting back to zero job losses from the pandemic.
In fact, of the fifty states and the District of Columbia, Ohio is among the thirteen states and D.C. yet to fully recover the jobs lost during the pandemic. That means thirty-eight states HAVE fully recovered and have begun to add net new jobs, with Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Florida leading the charge. Again, as with the job growth from 2012 to 2019, if JobsOhio was so effective at ITS job, why didn’t Ohio hit the top ten in the recovery or even the top twenty or even the top thirty or even break even by now? What is the excuse JobsOhio bureaucrats, DeWine, and Husted will give to explain Ohio’s poor showing?
Regardless of their hot air, it is, frankly, steer manure.
And, Ohio isn’t just lagging in job growth. On personal income growth, Ohio came in ranked 34th in 2022 and 41st from 2017 to 2022, which covers the first term of DeWine-Husted.
On Gross Domestic Product growth, again, Ohio held the 42nd spot in 2022 and the 28th spot from 2017 to 2022.
So, whether its private sector job growth, personal income growth, or GDP growth, Ohio mostly lingers at the back of the pack year-after-year. No matter what spin JobsOhio, DeWine, or Husted want to give you, these broad measures truly reflect the “state of Ohio.” Fewer jobs lead to fewer opportunities to seek personal income increases, which leads to a weak overall economy as reflected in Ohio’s middling-to-anemic GDP growth.
Instead of issuing another press release about Intel, JobsOhio, DeWine, and Husted should issue an apology to Ohioans for how badly they’ve botched their stewardship of our economy. While they are at it, perhaps they should apologize for shutting down Ohio’s economy and schools and the enormous harm they did to our kids based on the flawed advice of progressive left media darling Amy Acton. Unfortunately, career politicians and bureaucrats don’t appear to be capable of contrition. Any honest person who prides himself on accountability, responsibility, and transparency would admit his failure and, most importantly and for the love of God, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAT IS WORKING IN OTHER STATES!!!!!
A good place to start would be to make Ohio a right-to-work state. I’ve previously outlined how to do that in a manner that wouldn’t be subject to a veto referendum and wouldn’t be reviewable by the Ohio Supreme Court. All we need is a supermajority in the legislature and an Administration with the spine to do it. Ohio has the former (political control), but, as of today, lacks the latter (spine). As the chart below unequivocally shows, private sector job growth is occurring in right-to-work states at more than twice the pace as forced unionization states and greater than four times the pace in pathetic Ohio—and notice that red line isn’t as steep as the orange and blue lines since 2010, which is additional evidence of JobsOhio’s uselessness.
Two additional policies would be to eliminate, not just flatten, the state income tax along with ending Kasich’s costly Medicaid expansion idiocy. Contrary to his promise that it would only add 275,000 Ohioans to the Medicaid rolls, Ohio has now added nearly 1.2 million people to Medicaid since Kasich’s expansion under ObamaCare. I predicted in 2013 it would be roughly 1,000,000 new enrollees. Ohio’s Medicaid program is now 75% the size of its private sector with only one worker covering the costs of 3/4th an enrollee in Medicaid. That level of dependency is unsustainable, as Medicaid swallows 50% of the state budget.
Another idea is to eliminate JobsOhio and use its funds to build a world-class airport in the Columbus region like Denver did in the mid-1990s when it replaced the land-locked Stapleton Airport with Denver International Airport. DIA is now the 3rd busiest airport in the world and creating an economic boom in Colorado. By building a world-class airport, Ohio would substantially increase Ohio’s business friendliness and make living in Ohio much easier, as business and leisure travelers wouldn’t have to fly somewhere to get somewhere. Ohio also would be a much better place for United, American, and Southwest to place a HUB than Chicago, which is about as hostile to business as any state and constantly dealing with bad weather from the lake effect, thereby causing cancellations and delays.
The point is the status quo as represented by JobsOhio and the DeWine-Husted policies simply aren’t working for Ohioans and their businesses, especially those outside of the Greater Columbus and Cincinnati areas. We must do something different. And please don’t just believe me, but look at the data yourself at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website (www.bls.gov) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis website (www.bea.gov). As Albert Einstein wisely said, doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. It is time to stop the insanity in Ohio.