Liz Truss’s successor would be better off looking elsewhere in America for inspiration.
The former Ohio governor has no business lecturing anyone on budgeting.
C nn contributor John Kasich, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, lectured soon-to-be-former British prime minister Liz Truss on sticking to her fiscally conservative principles. It’s wise advice that Kasich himself ignored while governor of Ohio.
“My team and I got the state’s fiscal house in order with a conservative approach to managing taxpayers’ money and a tight rein on government spending,” Kasich, a Republican, wrote of his eight years as governor (2011–19).
Kasich credited employment growth during his tenure to his decisions to repeal Ohio’s estate tax and cut state income-tax rates. While these changes were certainly improvements, cutting taxes was easier for Kasich than it would have been for Truss. Governor Kasich took office as Ohio was bouncing back from the Great Recession, and had wide Republican majorities in both houses of the Ohio General Assembly for the duration of his two terms. Truss took office at the start of a recession, facing a nationwide energy crisis and calls for her resignation from within her own party in the first two months.
Cutting taxes and restraining spending in the face of resistance was nonetheless the theme of Kasich’s op-ed: He complained about “skeptics who scream ‘That won’t work!’ while playing up the scenarios in which people could suffer,” and encouraged Truss not to “cave in to those who scream and yell the loudest.”
Much of the opposition Kasich faced from Ohio’s legislature was Republican refusal to pay for income-tax cuts with tax hikes. Kasich started fighting for a sharp tax increase on energy companies drilling for oil and natural gas in 2012. Year after year, he pushed for this tax hike as well as for increases in the state sales tax and in a Commercial Activity Tax instituted just six years before Kasich took office. In Kasich’s last full year in office, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation ranked Ohio 45th in its annual State Business Tax Climate Index.
“Hold true to your principles, pick a sound plan that you believe in and carry it through,” Kasich advised Truss. But on the spending side of the ledger, Kasich routinely boasts of his abandonment of conservative principles as if it’s a virtue.
“When you die and go to heaven, you’re going to see Saint Peter, and Saint Peter is not going to ask you, ‘Did you balance the budget?’ He’s going to ask you what did you do for the least of those,” Kasich told a North Carolina legislative committee in March. This biblically illiterate talking point is one Kasich has been repeating since he decided in 2013 to expand Medicaid to working-age Ohioans without kids or disabilities so that he could campaign as a moderate (and pad his budgets with Obamacare funds). Kasich said his Medicaid expansion would “bring back” $13 billion in “Ohio money” in its first seven years; seven years and $30 billion in new welfare spending later, Kasich keeps badgering other states to follow his lead instead of admitting his mistake.
The math of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion works for state lawmakers, but not for taxpayers: After tapering down from even greater federal-match rates, 90 percent of the program’s costs are borne by federal taxpayers. According to state data tracked by conservative think tank Opportunity Ohio, nearly a third of Ohio’s budget is now paid for with federal spending, and more than half of the state budget is spent on Medicaid. During Ohio’s 2022 fiscal year, which ended in June, average Medicaid expansion enrollment was 857,000. September enrollment was 927,000, at a monthly cost of $623 million.
Apart from Medicaid expansion, the policy Kasich is best known for is Senate Bill 5, a sweeping package of public-sector labor reforms that he signed in his first year in office. Labor unions spent $40 million overturning S.B. 5, and Kasich left office having been named an honorary member of the International Union of Operating Engineers as thanks for his squelching of efforts to make Ohio a right-to-work state.
In 2011, Ohio and all five neighboring states allowed unions to impose mandatory fees on nonmember workers. By the time Kasich’s second presidential campaign ramped up in 2016, neighboring Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia had all enacted right-to-work laws protecting workers from being fired for refusing to pay union dues.
The economic growth in Ohio resulting from these policies — as well as Kasich’s failure to reform Ohio’s disastrous municipal-tax system — is disappointing when compared with the rest of the country. Starting in November 2012, Ohio’s year-over-year private-sector job-creation rate trailed the national average every month until Kasich left office more than six years later.
Demonstrating his knack for politics, Kasich offered his counsel to Truss the same week she announced she would resign her post. Her successor would be better off looking elsewhere in America for inspiration.