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Abortion takes the spotlight in the US Senate race.

After some comments from a candidate, Haitian immigrants hit back against false and racist rumors.

And state tax policy is always a big issue.

Highlights from a debate on that this week.

In the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

The issue of abortion is front and center again in the race for U.S. Senate in Ohio, thanks to some comments that were quietly recorded at a campaign event.

In a video captured last Friday, Republican candidate Bernie Marino spoke to supporters in Cincinnati.

You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters.

Sadly, by the way, there's a lot of suburban women.

What is it?

Rural women that like, listen, abortions?

If I can't have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.

Okay.

A little crazy, by the way, but especially for women that are like past 50 of the.

SUV.

And there's another video from more than a year ago, just before Marino launched his bid for the U.S. Senate.

In a video posted on Facebook by Republican supporter, Marino talks about how the landmark Roe versus Wade case establishing a right to abortion was technically the wrong decision.

Imagine.

Imagine if you could go back in the delivery.

You popped in the door and out there you went back and met Madison and Hamilton, and Washington said, hey, you're in favor of worshiping Edwin Byrd?

You.

Are you kidding me?

These are the most Christian people on earth.

You never even heard of them.

So, hey, by the way, what do you say?

We're saying that the concept version provides you the right in front of worship.

You, like, now this, we're going back to the invoking.

Those comments sparked a firestorm of negative reaction from Republicans, including Republican former presidential candidate Nikki Haley and former TV personality Geraldo Rivera, who now lives in Greater Cleveland.

Outraged Democrats have jumped on the tapes as a way to ensure the issue of abortion and reproductive rights, which 57% of Ohioans guaranteed in the Constitution last year stays in the spotlight.

U.S.

Senator Sherrod Brown's campaign brought together Republicans who say they now won't vote for Merino.

am, but I'm over 50.

Not only does she want to disregard women's rights to our private personal medical decision, but he's also making fun of people for caring about our rights and the rights of others.

And frankly, I just don't think that's very funny.

you don't have to be a woman over 50.

To feel strongly about women's reproductive rights.

That's why I find Mr. Marino's, statements very disrespectful.

Disrespectful to me personally, but really to all women in my life, as well as a large majority of the Ohio voters.

In a statement, Marino spokesperson Reagan McCarthy said, quote, Bernie was clearly making a tongue in cheek joke about how Sherrod Brown and members of the left wing media like to pretend that the only issue that matters to women voters is abortion.

So Bernie's view is that women voters care just as much about the economy, rising prices, crime, and our open southern border as male voters do.

And it's disgusting that Democrats and their friends in the left wing media constantly treat all women as if they're automatically single issue voters on abortion who don't have other concerns that they vote on.

The struggle for illegal immigrants in Springfield continues for both those migrants and the city where they've settled.

Ohio's Republican U.S.

Senator J.D.

Vance, the vice presidential candidate, was among the first to share the unfounded and racist rumors about immigrants eating pets, for which there is no evidence talked about that at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday.

I wish the American media was half as interested in the stress on the local schools, the stress on the hospitals, and unaffordable housing.

As they are, and debunking a story that comes from the residents of Springfield.

Did you ever think about listening to people speak their truth instead of listening to some bureaucrat and assuming that everything that they tell you is true?

Former President Donald Trump has said he will bring his campaign to Springfield, but has not set a date.

Security was stepped up at a Springfield City Commission meeting this week, and mayor Rob Rue says ongoing threats have further strained the city's resources.

So he's cautious about that.

If a presidential candidate was going to come and and bring a message of of coming together, trying to work through problems, talk about the real concerns that why we're in the middle of this debate, immigration concerns and immigration reform.

That would be great.

We would just we'd like to see those words from any presidential candidate that came to our town.

And so my concern is what we've seen on the national stage.

I really wouldn't want that repeated.

From our community, from in our community.

Meanwhile, a nonprofit group representing Haitians in Springfield has used a state law that allows private citizens to file criminal charges to do so against Trump and Vance.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance says the false and racist rumors shared by both candidates have gone beyond their First Amendment rights because they have triggered false alarms, disruption of public services, menacing and harassment.

A Clark County municipal judge will determine if warrants will be issued.

The Trump campaign said in a statement that the Republican ticket is, quote, rightfully highlighting the failed immigration system that Kamala Harris has overseen and, quote, and again, claims thousands of Haitians in Springfield are illegal when most of them are not.

In Portage County, the Board of Elections has decided to exclude the sheriff's office from its security operations for early in-person voting.

This comes after Republican Sheriff Bruce Koski made national news for a Facebook post that urged people to take note of yards, with signs supporting Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris so that quoting directly when the illegal human locust, which she supports the places to live, will already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival and, quote, the ACLU of Ohio wrote him on September 17th, asking him to delete the post.

It has been removed.

And in a follow up post, Zukowski wrote that his previous comments, again directly quoting, may have been a little misinterpreted.

I, as the elected sheriff, do have a First Amendment right, as do all citizens.

he continued with elections there are consequences.

That being said, I believe that those who vote for individuals with liberal policies have to accept responsibility for their actions.

I am a law man, not a politician.

So Koski is up for reelection this year Well, reproductive rights is a big issue this fall.

The economy is almost always top of mind for voters and taxes.

And what they're used for are key elements of any candidate's economic plan, whether at the federal, state or local level.

I moderated a discussion on state tax policy with four experts who have all been guests on this show Bailey Williams, A Policy Matters Ohio, a progressive research group, Lori Novotny of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, and a pair who have tangled more than once on this set.

Greg Lawson from the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank, and Amy Hanauer, formerly a policy matters and now with a national left leaning organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

but I have watched as Ohio has just systematically cut taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations, shifted taxes to lower income taxpayers by cutting, the income tax, which is levied according to ability to pay and shifting to a sales tax and reduced its ability to invest in the very things that make our economy strong.

So it's very hard to watch, because I'm looking at other states that are doing good things to make sure that the wealthiest and the corporations pay their fair share, and doing much more as a result, to invest in their kids and invest in their families and invest in their communities.

So it's it's kind of hard to kind of come back to a state that you like so much and feel that so many legislators are making decisions that limit our future.

I want to ask Greg about that, because this leads into the whole discussion about state policy.

The personal income tax has been a target for Republicans going back decades.

At this point, former Governor John Kasich said he was going to cut the income tax.

He wanted to move to a consumption tax, sales tax, the latest bill that's out there, and I mentioned it in the intro, would phase out the income tax by 2030 and get rid of the commercial activity tax, which is the largest business tax.

What would be the result of that?

Why why would we want to do this?

Well, I think one thing is we're gonna have to be very cautious about how anything remotely like that is done.

We've seen states move towards eliminating, say, the income tax.

Buckeye Institute's on the record.

We're for that, but we're for it in a long term sense.

It needs to have a long glide path.

It can't be something that's done short term.

It has to be done with revenue triggers, meaning that if revenue targets aren't hit, you delay some of the tax reform or the cuts so that you don't end up with an unbalanced budget.

We have a constitutional provision in Ohio that you have to have a balanced budget.

So we can't do what, for example, my home state I was born in Kansas, Kansas screwed up royally.

They're a poster child for how to do tax reform badly.

They cut taxes dramatically without doing any kind of budget reform or anything like that to.

And they didn't do it in a long term, perspective.

They did it much more quickly and to rapidly.

So I think we need to be very careful.

They had to repeal.

They did actually.

And they actually, I believe it even overrode their governor's veto at the time, to do that.

So because it was so so that is not the model.

The model is smart, strategic, long term letting growth happen long term is six years long enough.

I mean, that's I would think six years is a two short.

And I would say that long term a long term strategy to decimate your ability to raise revenue from those most able to pay and decimate your ability to deliver the things that your communities need is not a strategy at all.

I mean, it's a strategy for Ohio to continue the path it's been on, which is lack of growth and population growth and wages that is far behind the nation, growth in jobs, that is far behind the nation and culture wars, which is what the junior senator from Ohio is wanting to deliver right now.

So I think it's it's really, you know, based on some of the best research on the on the tax plan.

But it's not a plan.

It's a, it's a plan for disaster for the state.

I want to ask you about that.

What, the research that you have on this.

What what would be the practical effect in Ohio in terms of how people how people pay?

Well, we're, as Amy has said, the income tax is the one tax in Ohio is based on your ability to pay, eliminating that as long or as well as what the commercial activity tax.

We're looking at over $10 billion in lost revenue.

I think it's closer.

About 13, about half of our total state tax revenue would be gone from eliminating these two taxes, just trying to recoup half of that through sales tax revenue, and assuming that increased economic activity will, will help boost some of that revenue.

That is very wishful thinking.

We'll have to increase our sales tax to some of the highest in the nation, above 8%, just at the state level, just to get back half of that revenue.

And that's a big shift towards, shifting that tax, balance from, again, the income tax being based on your ability to pay to the sales tax being a very regressive tax act, will take up more income for lower earning Ohioans.

Greg, I want to ask you to weigh in on that briefly, that the sales tax is regressive.

It hits people who make less money harder.

I will also say that a lot of staples of life are exempted from the sales tax base, as it is, like groceries.

I mean, the different things in the checkout line and stuff like that, but staples are exempted.

But I'll tell you the here's the issue.

When you look at academic literature on economics, when you tax more of something, you're going to get less of whatever that item is.

Now, you still have to tax things because you still have to raise revenue.

So what you want to do is you want to have the least distorting tax possible at tax, that that doesn't influence the decision making of individuals or the decision making of businesses.

So you want to try to find that a low rate, broad based, consumption tax makes more sense.

One thing Ohio needs to think about, if they're going to get serious about doing something on the income tax side, is they're going to have to eventually look at broadening the sales tax base so that we can ameliorate some of the issues with some of the rate increases, because I agree, the rate increases that you would have to do to to do this in a very short time period would be usurious.

Doesn't make sense.

Plus, counties have piggyback sales taxes, which would make, especially anywhere that's on the state border, a problem and stuff like that.

So we'd have to do it.

But we need to start thinking about base expansion.

You want to tax?

More or less.

I can just jump in as well, because pushing or expanding the tax base means that Ohio will have to start taxing things such as groceries, such as things as prescription drugs.

So are we really going to ask seniors who are trying to afford their medications, or mothers trying to afford their groceries to pay more, instead of just having the rich pay a little bit more through income And I would just piggyback a little bit on what Bailey said.

The, my organization is the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

It and we work with policy matters, Ohio, to to do the the numbers for the tax plan.

It accounts for the items that are exempt from the sales tax.

And we still find that it is a massive shift from the wealthiest Ohioans to working class and low income Ohioans when we when we shift to a sales tax.

So the fact that some things are exempt, great.

But it doesn't change the fact that this is a shift from the wealthy who can most afford to pay on to the lowest income.

And as as Jory said, I mean, I guess we'll get into our earned income tax credit and our lack of a child tax credit in Ohio, which so many states are moving to start having.

But we just are doing so many things in this state to shift taxes from those most able to pay to those least able to pay and reduce our ability to invest.

But there's also another effect here of tax shifting to local communities aren't don't they have to start making up for the revenue that they're losing?

Well, potentially some, but I'd also say that one of the things that Ohio has not done a very good job of, and this is a little bit outside tax policy.

So I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole too far.

But how do we structure local government?

How many layers of local government, how many services, duplication of services, various things like that.

One thing that I've worked on ever since I've been a Buckeye, and I think it's something we need to continue to talk about, is the very structure of local government is, is is very complicated in Ohio, more so than some other states because we're a home rule state.

A lot of this goes back to how the state was created, Northwest Ordinance, things like that.

But the problem is, is that because we have so many layers, we have layers of taxation that kind of build upon each other.

And the question is, are we always getting the bang for the buck of the services at the local level?

I would argue that we haven't done a very good job on the structural basis of things, because really the taxes are downstream of the services.

People want services.

That's true.

People are going to want to pay for services.

I think that's absolutely correct.

But the question is how much are you paying for those services?

If you lower the state income tax, you lower the revenue.

You and also the other element here is the lowering of money that goes from the local government fund that goes to local governments.

Jerry, I think you wanted to speak here.

I mean, you you rely on local governments.

Sure.

Many of course, broadly, your health and human services sector, among many other sectors, among basic needs that we all rely on every day, right?

When we talk to food pantry visitors, we talk to we surveyed 2300 food pantry visitors earlier this year about why they're coming to our lines.

What are their experience right now?

They're telling us about the choices they're making between affording transportation or affording food, affording child care, or affording food.

We need revenue to be able to fund affordable child care for low wage workers so they can continue to get to work.

Right.

And all of that rolls into a conversation about making sure that we have work that pays long term.

And when I think about a tax base, I'm thinking about we're seeing 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 or more in some places of Ohio, of our food pantry visitors that are over 60, they found themselves in their golden years.

They don't have the savings that they expected that would stretch far enough to afford.

And when I think about property tax burden on them, sales tax burden on them, you know, we need a base of, of tax revenue that's going to support services for the life of a population in Ohio that has aged.

I think we we all want our older adults to live with dignity in place, and that's part of raising adequate revenue to do so.

It's been mentioned a couple of times here the earned income tax credit.

I want to talk about that a little bit.

And Bailey, I want to ask you, Ohio has a nonrefundable earned income tax credit.

What's the benefit of having it be refundable.

Why do that.

Right.

So, the benefit of having it be refundable.

So if you have a negative or you don't have a tax liability at all, you don't have to pay any tax.

You've already paid too or too much, through withholdings, whatever the case may be, if it's refundable, you still get the value of that credit through a refund.

And that's the best way to ensure that lower income individuals.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, people who, benefit from the standard deduction and other tax credits that lower their, their tax liability get making sure that these, credits are refundable gives them the value of that credit here in Ohio.

Are, EitC is a 30% nonrefundable credit.

So it's it's completely worthless of, Ohioans who do not have a tax liability.

And it kind of goes against the entire basis of the SEC when it's trying to give incentives to various people and trying to give them various why not do that?

Right.

Well, I think the well, the first thing is a lot of folks, part of it is we've dropped a lot of people off of the income tax period.

So that's one of the issues is if you're not paying an income tax, which is was bad.

So we've lowered it and I want to jump in here.

But but I'd say, look, the federal one is refundable.

I think that there probably needs to be some conversations in the childcare space.

I know those are happening at some level at the General Assembly, so we probably are going to have to talk about that.

And depending on how we want to structure something like that, we're going to have to be a little bit careful because unlike the feds who essentially can kind of monetize that and do things like that, we the state doesn't able to do that.

So we got to be careful if we're going to start moving in the direction of making the state income tax or, having the refund ability there.

But if you have a liability, it should be able to zero it out.

That is what the that's what a non refundable one does.

But again we have a lot of people that are already off of the income tax rolls.

And I think what we probably really need to start focusing on in Ohio too, is and this is why taxation gets so complicated, is it's not just the state level of the federal level is the local level, too.

The municipal income tax in the state of Ohio is a tax that everybody pays who makes money, no matter what.

Everybody pays in and it's a flat rate.

So when we talk about that, there's no progressivity to the local income tax.

Now we can argue about whether that's a necessary revenue stream for local governments.

But let's understand what that means for individuals.

So I want Amy to jump.

So for those of you who don't know it, Greg and Karen and I used to do this regularly when I when I lived in Ohio.

And I have regularly missed Greg because, we, we enjoy mixing it up, but, but he's saying some things that I think are a little bit confusing.

First of all, one of the good things that that one of the good things about the earned income tax credit is, is designed not only to offset income tax payments, but to offset those tax payments, those precise tax payments that Greg is advocating go up that are disproportionately borne by lower income families.

So the earned income tax credit doesn't just offset income taxes, it also offsets sales taxes, property taxes, and other more regressive forms of taxation that lower income people pay more of.

And that hasn't gone away.

Almost every state, you know, earned income tax credits.

I was so proud when Ohio passed that.

But other states have really leapfrogged us because most of those earned income tax credits at the state level are refundable now because it doesn't make any sense to say we want to help people work, but we're going to leave out the lowest income people when we do that.

And there's a similar debate on the child tax credit.

And I'll just say one more thing, because Greg mentioned wanting to lower the rates and broaden the base.

That's something that anti-tax people always say when they when they want to shift taxes away from the highest income, they say, we're going to lower the rates and broaden the base, but then they don't broaden the base.

And we saw that at the federal level with the 2017 tax cuts, that the base wasn't run, that 55 profitable corporations paid zero taxes.

After the passage of that supposedly rate lowering, base broadening.

So I, I and I will just say one more thing is that I think they should thank you.

I'm going to go in there.

There we go.

And I would just say one more thing.

I think it's interesting that Greg wants to be so cautious about the potential costs of refund ability of the earned income tax Credit, but doesn't want to be cautious about the cost of delivering more and more and more tax cuts every year to the wealthiest Ohioans.

I think if we want to be cautious about helping the lowest income Ohioans thrive, we want to be certainly cautious about continuing to reward the wealthiest Ohioans.

There's another area where I think you folks agree the LLC loophole, and that is where, LLC can exempt the first 250,000 of $1 million in income and then pay a low tax rate on the rest.

It costs the state $1 billion a year, approximately.

And there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence that it creates jobs.

I mean, Bailey, have you seen any evidence of that?

Not any.

Nope, not in our research here.

There's really no good excuse for it, in my opinion.

So yeah, let's look that up.

Costing us $1 billion.

That could help us pass a, completely refundable child tax credit that could help us fund a, refundable EitC at 10% four times.

We could do that with this money.

And it's a much better investment in, working in everyday Ohioans, right?

Why not?

Well, why do we have this so?

Well, and the idea is that it was meant to be for small business owners to be able to get to it because you see, that they can make investments back, hire people, do things like that.

I'm not sure that it's as well targeted as it should be.

That's basically what we're hearing here.

So, you know, lawyers typically can use this.

A lot of folks like that, you know, they don't necessarily hire somebody else just because they made some of that.

I will say, though, that you do need to be cautious because there again, and I know I use that word, but this is why tax reform is obviously a very challenging thing.

Because if you raise that on certain like contractors and things like that, you could have some real negative impacts on some small businesses that do have potential job, impacts downstream.

One thing I think that if you're going to move towards this income tax elimination idea, like some members of the General Assembly are pushing for, you would, I mean, at some point you wouldn't even need to have the small quote unquote business loophole because you have no income tax.

So you would probably want to, reduce things as you phase it out.

So I would not I'd be careful about trying to jack it up.

As you're facing down the income tax as well, because at some point that doesn't make sense, to do it that way.

But we have to be careful.

I think we could have been a little more cautious in how we initially put some of this stuff together, because what we've ended up doing is, if you're really serious about getting rid of the income tax, as some members of the legislature want to be, they've made it really hard for themselves to do that because of how they structured previous rounds of tax.

And there have been efforts to try to get rid of this loophole that have gone on to pay for lowering rates.

You can make an argument that if you phased it up, you could lower the rates commensurately for everybody.

Something like that.

It's kind of pulling the different levers.

Amy's going to say something.

Well, I, I've actually lost a little track of the Ohio LLC loophole.

But what I will say is like backing up from a federal level, what I see is that is that the states that are doing the most for their families and the states that are growing the quickest, and this is states that are really diverse in terms of where they are geographic and where they are economically, are the states that are recognizing that they that they have to tax the wealthiest more in that they have to tax corporations more, because that is actually what enables them to invest in things that enable corporations to thrive.

Right?

Like if we don't have a good, K-12 education system, if we don't have a good college system, if working class kids can't afford to go to college, then how our business is going to thrive in that state.

And so I think the states that are growing fastest and seeing the fastest income growth and the fastest population will not always the fastest population growth, but the fastest income growth are the states that are choosing a more, investment oriented approach to taxation.

I You can see the full conversation in the City Club of Cleveland's archives at City Club Talk.

And that is 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 website at State News Talk or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

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Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts, and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

A.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.