Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Med Mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP, now with eight locations across the country.

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Moore and Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OAG Dawg.

Less than a month to go before Ohio needs a new congressional map.

Ohio joins other states in suing over the federal COVID vaccine or test mandate coming in January, and two experts tear into the state's budget, taxes and the unemployment system.

All this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler.

Ohio still has no new map with one less member of Congress as the state must go down to 15 districts.

But with the deadline for the map coming at the end of the month, the state does have a new committee to put together that map.

The Joint Committee on Ohio Congressional Redistricting is likely to be twice, which is required in the constitutional amendment voters approved in 2018.

Citizen turnout was light for that hearing, with those speaking under a five minute time limit saying they didn't get much notice that testimony was being accepted on the four proposed maps.

While both the Republican one showed just two Democratic districts, the experts at the Daves redistricting website say the Senate Republicans map is potentially the most competitive.

That's defined as a split within ten points.

Only a third of State House Democrats would need to sign on for a ten year map, and if that doesn't work, Supermajority Republicans can pass a four year map.

Governor Mike DeWine has added his thoughts on this, saying last week that the proposed maps quote are not going to fly.

Ohio has a new law on fireworks after DeWine signed a bill allowing bottle rockets, Roman candles and other consumer grade fireworks that have been illegal since 1972 to be set off in Ohio.

A more than 15 days each year, including New Year's Eve and Day, Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth Memorial and Labor Day weekends, and the three days around July fourth plus the weekend before and after it.

DeWine hinted at the reason why he would sign it after a meeting with the British ambassador earlier this month.

The bill that I vetoed can still be that vote and that can be overridden, so that is certainly one option that the Legislature has told us th and that they might exercise.

The bill maximizes the size of fireworks, store showrooms, 7500 square feet and includes sprinkler requirements.

Current law allows show firms of up to 5000 square feet.

The earlier bill had no sprinkler requirements and would allow showrooms of up to 10,000 square feet.

In his veto of the previous bill, DeWine noted a 1996 fire at a fireworks store in Scott Town in Lawrence County, where nine people died after a lit cigaret ignited a display.

Ohio safety law on fireworks stores changed after that, including the banning of smoking and lighters in those retailers.

Ohio is suing over the Biden administration's rule that all workers at companies with over 100 employees must be vaccinated against COVID or be tested regularly by January fourth.

Republican Attorney General Dados filed suit both over the private sector rule, as well as the one requiring federal contractors follow it, saying the administration doesn't have the authority to require vaccines for 84 million private sector workers nationwide, and that Ohio deputies quitting over it will lead the release of federal detainees housed in county jails.

Half the states are suing, nearly all led by Republicans, while the rule was blocked by a court last weekend.

Ohio's nursing homes are preparing for the deadline.

Just over half of Ohioans working in nursing homes are vaccinated against COVID, though residents and staff were the first to be offered the vaccines almost a year ago.

As of Tuesday, 4381 deaths in Ohio from COVID have a new reported since September first.

That's an average of 63 people who have died of COVID reported every day in Ohio since the first of September.

There have been bills proposed this year on vaccine mandates, trans athletes and sports, expanding taxpayer paid vouchers for private schools and on abortion, including a new one modeled after the Texas law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or those who help women get abortions.

But the Ohio proposal goes further in that it also bans all abortions, and there was no congressional map yet in the state House and Senate maps are being challenged in the Ohio Supreme Court.

This week, I reached out to two of my favorite policy analysts, Greg Lawson at the conservative Buckeye Institute and Zack Schiller at the Liberal Policy Matters Ohio to talk about unemployment tax policy and, of course, the new state budget, which so far remains the biggest thing state lawmakers have accomplished this year.

So the budget is now signed and in place, including the non-monetary budget policy pieces they took effect last month.

So what do you think of the final budget product and are there any elements that you're specifically concerned about?

I'll start with you, Zack.

Well, I would highlight two things.

one, we have very significant income tax cuts, which are going largely to people who don't need them and reducing the revenue available to the state by $1.7 billion, which could be spent on innumerable important services that we need, as well as the imposition of new tax breaks and in fact, even the elimination of the committee that we had to examine.

So we're getting rid of transparency and creating new ones like, for example, ordering businesses to hire temps and not pay sales tax.

So I think that on the tax side, we have significantly reduced the resources available to the state in a way that is not going to help the state's economy and is going to further inequality.

I do think that there was one really significant and positive thing.

I mean, there were other positive split by far.

The most positive thing was the approval of the Fair School Funding Plan, which for the first time we can say we have actually a decent plan that will provide money to school districts based on the actual cost of educating the child.

The downside to that, unfortunately, however, is that we didn't decide to pay for it.

We're only paying for it for the first couple of years.

And had we not chosen to go ahead with these tax cuts, I daresay we'd be a long ways toward being able to fully fund that, which I think is really should be a top priority for legislators.

So, Greg, give me your quick, high points and low points in budget.

Sure.

Well, I think first of all, the budget did make some wise investments.

one of the things I been mentioned is that there's a lot of work on broadband and getting funding out for broadband.

I think I probably would agree with that.

We agreed that there needs to be a build out of that.

There's a program that's now established and funded that accomplishes a lot there, and that will help both with telecommuting as time goes on, as well as telehealth, which is something that is a big deal and has grown exponentially really during the COVID pandemic.

So I think that that makes sense.

There were some investments there and infrastructure.

I disagree on the tax cut side.

I think that there's a lot of the amount of federal money that's coming in.

City of Cleveland's getting $500 million of, you know, half a billion dollars in federal aid coming in.

And there's more money that's going to be coming in next year out of the new federal bill.

That was the first one that happened under the Trump administration, and there was obviously the newer one the Biden administration.

So the cup, it's not exactly like that.

We're we're suffering from revenue declines.

In fact, we have revenues really doing very well.

Sales tax and income tax are coming in, you know, essentially above target.

Some of that is because of federal aid.

But but we have a lot of good things coming in to the state and it wasn't a perfect budget, but it was a good one.

And I'd say to on school choice families, empowering parents and families to be able to avail themselves of education options that are beneficial to their unique set of circumstances, especially after all the shutdowns that we saw in schools during COVID.

That was a really big, I think, a big victory for Ohio families.

While we're on the subject of taxes, I want to ask about a Republican backed bill that would phase out state's main business tax and commercial activity tax over five years.

It brings in more than $1.7 billion a year, but Zach, only about a third of businesses are actually paying that tax in Ohio.

Why not get rid of it and move to something like consumption or sales tax with exemptions for necessary items such as food and prescriptions, which we have now?

I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from there, there are two thirds of the businesses that pay the commercial activity, paying $150, and that's it.

There are a lot of other businesses that don't pay it at all.

So this is not really much of an imposition on small business in Ohio because they're paying little or nothing.

So that's what I was saying.

Only a third of the businesses are paying the tax.

So it's a major source of revenue.

I believe that we ought to have a corporate profits tax like the vast bulk of other states do and like Ohio used to.

I think we often forget that commercial activity tax was a giant tax cut.

I'll quote for you a comment made in a filing by the Ohio Business Roundtable, which said quote the new business tax system substantially lowered the overall tax burden on business.

We basically gave business over 1,000,000,000 dollar tax cut when we created the commercial activity tax.

The idea that businesses shouldn't pay tax when they're not making money, they pay for Big $10 a year in property tax when they're not making money.

The idea that businesses don't benefit from education, from roads, from having markets available to them, they all happen to take advantage of those, regardless of whether they're making money.

So the way I see it, yes, we could improve that tax by adding in a component that relates to the profitability so companies that are making money hand over fist will in fact pay something more as they do in other states.

But the notion that we should get rid of it?

For what?

Let me ask Greg about this.

You've been advocating cutting the cap cap for years.

So I mean, the first question, of course, is are you ever going to be happy?

Are you not going to be happy until all business taxes are gone?

And doesn't you cut the cap?

Doesn't that put the burden on individuals?

If you start talking about going to sales and consumption taxes?

Aren't you really pushing that down toward individuals?

Well, it's the biggest corporations in Ohio, not the small businesses that are paying the tax.

Well, I think there's a couple of points.

I think the commercial.

I mean, Zack is right up to a point there because, you know, there was a bad tax at the commercial activities tax which got taxed, replaced in the mid 2000s.

That was had a lot of loopholes in it, frankly, too, and the cap was intended to not have that.

The problem with it is, you know, as Zack alluded to, this is you're nailing companies that don't have profitability.

And so that's a question.

Usually when you hit people on on tax, you try to make sure that you're getting what they that they're at least making money at first.

Now, when he's mentioned the property tax, interestingly enough, I would argue that Ohio, a lot of people would say we have really high property taxes in Ohio, and part of the problem that we have in Ohio is we actually do too much carving out of the property tax base for exemptions.

And lot of that is local economic development decisions that are made at the local level.

But we have some challenges of making Swiss cheese out of property tax.

And so actually shifting more to property tax actually makes more sense, I think, in the long run.

So we say, what would you rather see?

I think we need to see a shift to taxes that are more helpful to growing the overall economy as time goes on.

You know, when you raise income or corporate taxes, you tend to see impacts, negative impact some more than other.

Keep saying this.

But again, we've had here, we've had 15 years now of results.

Know this isn't just some academic.

Oh, look at what some paper says.

We've had 15 years to look at what this tax change did.

It hasn't generated a vibrant economy now, I suppose, as Karen says, maybe you don't want to have any business taxes at all.

Ernst and Young, in a study for the leading pro-business tax lobby, has said that Ohio's business taxes are well below average in the country and they have been for some time.

Where's the big business rush to Ohio because of these lower business taxes?

You know, it just ain't happening.

We hear this rhetoric again and again and again.

Cut business taxes that'll bring about this incredible renaissance.

We've cut them.

We've cut them, we've cut them.

And it hasn't happened.

Let's use that revenue for investments in things like broadband by rid of lead.

You know, that's that's Ohio always hitting children.

You know, I just I mean, if we've been having this conversation in 2005, you could argue there is no argument in 2021.

You know, what is Ohio?

What are Ohio incomes?

You know what's happened in the last 15 years since you've had your big business tax cuts?

If your argument is, well, let's not have any business taxes at all.

Yes, Karen's right.

We'll all be paying for it as individuals.

The point, right, real quickly.

Well, first of all, when you look at the overall situation for how do you create growth and jobs?

Obviously, taxes is one piece of the puzzle.

And I think as I've said multiple times on this show over the years, you know, there's a lot of regulatory reforms that need to happen.

There's a lot of issues that we have with low income folks.

We're going to talk about bail reform later, but there's impacts and negative income impacts on low income folks that happen because of criminal justice issues.

There's a whole host of things that Ohio doesn't do very well, and I also like keep come back to local taxes and how the municipal income tax in particular operates is actually uniquely bad because no other country and there are no other state in the country has a local income tax.

The way that we have a local income tax and it actually is causing a lot of problems, and we know that now because of how it's negatively been impacted through COVID and the shutdown.

So I think that what we have to realize is is that, you know what, we like to see a lot more income growth than we've seen.

Absolutely.

But it's not all about just taxes.

I think tax is one piece of it.

That's why if we go and just say, Hey, let's raise all these taxes, I can guarantee you're not going to see a lot of you're not going to see this cornucopia of businesses popping in and you're not going to be seeing all of that happening, either.

Under that situation, we had high taxes in the eighties and, you know, we had a lot of challenges in the eighties do we.

Went.

From income as large as.

Saying this is going to do it, it hasn't gone.

Don't change the conversation.

So, oh, it's not all taxes.

It was all the taxes when you were cutting them.

So, you know.

Look, I never made that argument.

There may have been some people at the State House made an argument and they would've.

Been wrong is important.

It should have done something it hasn't.

Let's move on to a different way of looking at things.

You know, this is a very difficult conversation to have over Zoom.

I will say this is going back and forth there.

The figures I cited from Ernst and Young, they're not just state taxes.

You know, now that you've got what would you want cutting taxes at the state level now you said, Well, let's cut local taxes.

Overall, state and local taxes in Ohio are lower for business and in the rest of the country by a substantial margin.

That's the fact.

So it hasn't worked.

Let's put that money into things that are going to help people and help our economy directly instead of putting a lot of money in education we're not using.

We have since tirar the Constitution cases, so and we are investing in schools and we are investing maybe not as much as you like, but it's not exactly like schools don't have any funding at all.

And we maybe we can, you know, with school funding plan or whether that gets funded at the full level or not, that I mean, we have spending before the Great Recession, back in the middle of 2000, we were spending over inflation in state dollars in the state.

Now there's been more obviously than than the local taxes do and school funding to address the constitutional case that came about.

So it's not exactly like there's a dearth of spending that's out there.

I mean, teachers salaries, the average salary might be a little bit below in some of the regional ones, but it's pretty competitive with what most other states do for teacher salaries.

So again, I guess this whole notion that if we had all this other money, we'd be investing it, I don't know.

Plus we also don't talk about what we do, and we have things like, you know, prevailing wage project labor agreements, how we soak up money with higher costs than we could think.

Up money so we can get a decent wage, we should be.

How do you.

How do you make your revenue go further so you can get more done?

I mean, these are all right.

I want to move on here.

I want to move on here to another important topic here because we're talking about workers now.

I want to move on to talk about unemployment real quickly.

This week, the Ohio Supreme Court is deciding it will take up the case of whether Governor Mike DeWine had the authority to end the federal program that provided 300 weekly checks unemployed Ohioans more than two months early.

He ended that program.

He said he did that to get people back to work.

But retailers, restaurants and other businesses currently say that they still need workers having closed down, sometimes because of lack of staff.

So here we are, Greg.

The checks weren't the problem, were they?

What was the problem?

Why is this still happening?

Is it because businesses just aren't getting enough pay and benefits to get people back?

Well, I think that here again, we get to things where there's not a simple silver bullet answers to these things.

We're obviously on the record.

I mean, we actually saw Amakhosi's that said, Hey, the Supreme Court should actually look at this.

We think the governor made the right decision.

We supported what the administration did i and there's variable data that we've seen about from from different employment, web searches and things like that that show that there seemed to be some impact.

But no, it's not the only thing that's going to do it.

Obviously, there's childcare issues.

I'm sure Zack mentioned that.

I think that is an issue that in particular, women have some real challenges that are very unique there that are still problems and are actually being highly exacerbated because of COVID.

And I think there's a conversation that we probably do need to have on that.

But if but if you're having problems now, it doesn't make much sense to stand to reason that you're going to increase the amount of money that someb come back into the labor force or to hold on.

The key is you don't want to disincentivize people to get back in and then lose all of the skill sets that they already had or have them atrophy over time.

So I think this is a good move.

No.

Like every with taxes and regulation, it's it's it's many different issues and you got to work at all of them to get the solutions that you want because if you say it's one thing, it's never going to work out that way.

But it's not going to be good.

If you try to put that back on there, you're not going to get people working strongly that way.

You know that we are sitting here at 5.4% unemployment right now, which is until August.

It's down only off a point from the lowest level in 14 years, which is back in March of 2018 or 4.4%.

So are people going back to work?

Aren't they going back to work?

And are businesses potentially setting up problems down the road if they are offering these more generous benefits?

Can they sustain those more?

What do you think?

What do you think the solution here is?

Well, first of all, I want to respond to some of Greg's comments here.

I mean, I think as one politician once said, you're entitled to your opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts and the facts are again in.

We saw what happened in the 25 states that cut benefits versus those that didn't.

Their job growth did not increase any more than those who did.

We've seen what's happened in the Ohio labor market, where we have well over 200,000 people who have left the labor market who are not eligible for unemployment benefits.

And so the question of them getting unemployment benefits, cutting them off has nothing to do with whether they reenter the labor market.

They have not reentered the labor market and happens to be interestingly, not that different from the number of jobs that we've lost.

So the fact is that we heard last spring Governor DeWine and a whole bunch of conservatives telling us we need to cut unemployment benefits that's going to get everybody back to work.

They didn't say it was all these other factors, you know, all these different.

They said that what we should do.

They did it.

And it turned out to be wrong because people didn't all go back to work.

It was wrong.

It was the wrong thing to do.

And it injured Ohioans and it injured the Ohio economy because that was hundreds of millions of federal dollars that were not spent at Ohio businesses that could have hired people.

Well, that could have kept people on the job, so it did not help the economy.

It hurt the economy.

Now the question of what's going to happen going forward.

Yes, there are some excellent reasons.

We don't, I think, have a complete understanding, to be honest with all of the things that are keeping people out of the labor market.

We do know that a lack of affordable, accessible child care is one of them.

We know that continuing concerns about the COVID and the Delta variant is one of them.

We know that early retirements is one of them, that a number of people who are perhaps thinking about retirement but hadn't intended to do so retire early as they might, and who knows if they will be induced to come back in?

We don't know.

I don't think that we have an issue with employers raising wages too much that they can't sustain it.

We've had, you know, decades worth of basically no real wage growth for most people with the state giving them a raise.

It's about time.

Well, I want to conclude here with some common ground.

Talk a little bit about bail reform, which both policy matters.

Ohio and the Buckeye Institute had been on the record as supporting.

Right now, though, it doesn't seem to be moving.

And I'm wondering if there's a concern that the hyperpartisan environment we're in.

In many cases, because of this issue, the issues that we've been talking about right now could be derailing this thing.

That is a bipartisan effort that really stands to save money for state and local governments that really can help improve the lives of people who are in the judicial system.

I want to talk to you, Greg, first about this.

Where is the bail reform system movement going?

Why is there not been any movement when there have been so many bipartisan people who've been coming out in support of it over time?

I think there's still it is frustrating and a lot of folks who are on the advocates side, you know, I think are frustrated there hasn't been movement, and I think there's a lot of fear that this is going to end up kind of like Senate Bill three did last session, which was a really robust and meaningful package to try to deal with some criminal justice issues and some problems with drug drug offenses and stuff.

I know there's work that's being done right now to address some concerns that judges have right now what you what you see as you see a lot of the prosecutor, county prosecutors and a lot of judges and even some of the sheriffs.

So some of these folks are concerned about it.

They have issues.

I think that some of them are quite frankly, overwrought.

And I think some of them are pulling in examples from outside of Ohio that don't apply to the actual bill that we're considering in Ohio and before the General Assembly in Ohio.

And so but you know, look, when you have judges and prosecutors and folks and sheriffs contacting legislators saying, Oh, it's a terrible thing, you know, it's going to make, let's go.

But but I think there's there's a pathway forward.

The Chief Justice has been very supportive of this for a while.

Obviously, there was a rule change at the state Supreme Court that we that, you know, the Buckeyes, we actually had somebody who served on a on the panel that ultimately made that recommendation, and we were very grateful for that.

And I think that's good.

So I think that there's a package that will be forthcoming.

I'm not exactly sure when it is, but there is still ongoing work that is going on to try to address it.

And there are some technical issues here.

I mean, this bill has a new some new concepts that are in there.

I'm still optimistic.

So I think that there's still a pathway for this to happen and frankly, it should happen.

It is the right thing, as you mentioned.

And first foremost, it's moral thing to do to.

Zach, I want to wrap this all up here with your thoughts on this and is there potentially, though a concern about a lack of trust on some people on the more progressive side of the aisle?

Because some of the things that have been happening at the State House with some bills that have been proposed that are really kind of opposite to what a lot of progressive and liberal thinkers believe, I mean, is there a lack of trust here?

Well, I can't speak to what the legislators may be feeling on this.

I would tend to think that if these bills actually were to move, there would be plenty of support and whatever reservations more progressive people may have with some of the other things going on in the state.

You know, let's face it, Cash Bill creates a two tiered system of justice for people who have money to pay or able to get out and people who can't don't.

And that has an enormous cost to the families, to the communities.

And we have Greg and I can agree on this, but I don't think any real, you know, any real difference of opinion just illustrates that it's time.

It's time that we do this.

I I know that there always are certain folks who are going to stand in the way of this sort of thing, as there were, as Greg mentioned with Senate Bill three.

But I'm hopeful that we can we can make them happen.

And I think that will be a real benefit to everyone.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our web site at State News dot org, and you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

We leave you this week with images from the Ohio Veterans Plaza at the Statehouse to remember and honor those who serve.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than 1.4 million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Med Mutual dot com slash Ohio by the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP, now with eight locations across the country.

Porter Wright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community.

More at Porter Wright dot com and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 124,000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at OAG Dawg.