Voters should demand real-world plan for jobs
AThomas Suddes
riveting report, released Thursday, offers Ohioans a dozen bottom-line, plainEnglish questions to ask this year’s candidates for governor — about Ohio’s economy and Ohioans’ wallets.
“Twelve Questions for Ohio’s Next Governor,” and an accompanying report, “Toward a New Ohio,” are by Ohio State University’s retired vice president for business and finance, William Shkurti — once Ohio’s budget director and now an adjunct professor at OSU’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs — and Fran Stewart, a senior research associate at the university’s Ohio Manufacturing Institute. Among their questions:
• “Do you think targeted tax breaks and other financial incentives are appropriate tools for recruiting or retaining businesses? If so, do you see circumstances where costs might exceed benefits?”
• “Do you support what is known as ‘right-to-work’ legislation, which limits the ability of unions to collect dues or service fees from nonmembers?”
• “What portion of Ohio workers do you think needs training beyond a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree (including apprenticeships)? What would you do to achieve that goal, and who should pay for it?”
The questions offer a kind of proficiency test for the seven men and one woman vying to succeed Gov. John Kasich at November’s statewide election.
The candidates include Democrats Richard Cordray, Larry Ealy, Dennis Kucinich, Bill O’Neill, Paul Ray and state Sen. Joe Schiavoni as well as Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine and there is one woman, Republican Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor.
Also running for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively, are the Green Party’s Constance GadellNewton and Brett R. Joseph.
This year, asking solid questions is especially important: “For only the second time in the past 16 years, an incumbent governor will not be on the ballot,” Shkurti and Stewart noted. “The new governor and the voters who elect her or him will need to grapple with challenges to Ohio’s future, many of which are rooted in the state’s past.”
The data are sobering: “In 2016 national per capita income totaled $49,246, while Ohio’s was $44,568, a difference of $4,678 per person.
“Spread over 11.7 million Ohioans, that totals $54 billion not available for Ohioans to spend on themselves, their families and their communities,” they found.
Ohio’s “loss of high- paying manufacturing jobs has been a major contributor” to the state’s relative economic decline.
Shkurti and Stewart acknowledged there’s some subjectivity in determining what is the main reason for the decline: automation, domestic competition or foreign trade.
But evidence “strongly ( suggests) automation was a bigger factor than ( domestic competition and the foreign trade deficit) combined. This means any future set of policy initiatives needs to make sure Ohio workers are able to update their skills to keep up with changing technologies.”
In 1970, Franklin County’s average per capita income was just above the national average; now it’s slightly below.
Meanwhile, though, “Montgomery County (Dayton) … fell further than any of Ohio’s 88 counties … a brutal series of factory and related headquarters closings over the next 45 years cost it 65,000 of its 91,000 manufacturing jobs ( and) much of its middle class.”
After Montgomery, the counties with the largest decline in average per capita personal income compared with the nation’s, from 1970 to 2015, are Marion ( Marion); Richland ( Mansfield); and Trumbull ( Warren). In each instance, those counties lost longtime, good- paying manufacturing jobs. Marion Power Shovel, for example, “produced the steam shovels the built the Panama Canal. It closed its doors in 1978.” And Richland County “suffered the loss of 10,000 jobs over this period from a string of plant closings.”
As for Trumbull County, in 1970 it “boasted the highest proportion of manufacturing workers
( 49.1 percent) of any Ohio county. It lost nearly 70 percent of its manufacturing jobs (30,000 out of 43,000) between 1970 and 2015,” Shkurti and Stewart found. Yet out- of- staters seemingly were surprised that Trumbull voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
In Ohio campaigns for governor in the past 50 years, the word “jobs” has become more a cue for applause than a header for lists of concrete, doable, real- world proposals. That’s why Shkurti and Stewart’s “Twelve Questions” can help Ohioans get more facts and figures from their next governor — and less razzle and dazzle.