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Ohio is NOT broke.

Ohio is not broke! We the people know where the money is, we know where it goes. We're a consumer driven economy. We the working class buy stuff and it goes into the pockets of the investor class. Look at corporate profits. Look at Wall Street, look at the stock market. Look at CEO pay and you'll know who has money and who doesn't.

The Wall street is back to where it was in late 2007. How come we the people are not back to where we were in late 2007? Why are the rich continuing to get richer even in hard times and we are ask to endure the consequences of massive state budget cuts?

The answer is the same as it has been since the beginning of the industrial age, but never more emphatic than after the 2010 elections. The reason we can't ask the investor class to pay their fair share, even on a short term basis is simply because when asked, they say "no". It's as simple as that.They just say "no". They say "no" to the Republican who's political campaign they financed and then they start and finance "grassroots" organizations who turn the economic issues into social ones, and what we get is the culture wars. Working class people finger pointing at each other over bargaining rights and somehow they buy into "small government" and "cut spending" when those things will harm them, as they are now are finding out according to very recent polling. Republicans got elected saying jobs, jobs, jobs, and what we get is jobs cut in the budget. They used the phony financial crisis to end worker bargaining rights and and are trying to pass a budget that is attacks the middle class and ever increasing poor, even going as far as making prisoners pay to be in prison then putting them back on the streets flat broke, and to add insult to injury they introduce abortion bill after abortion bill. And they are far from being done.

The investor class seems to have a built in lack of respect for working class people, especially those that are really having the hardest lives, like the over 40 million Americans on food stamps, a figure that will go up if Kasich and other Republican governors succeed at adding to the misery and humiliation of life at the bottom while protecting the life at the top from any consequences whatsoever. 

A compromise budget that makes some cuts and raises some taxes on the investor class, not the working class, would balance the budget. You could even make the increases limited in time so they'd have to be revisited in a few years like the federal tax cuts were last year.

And it should be clear by now that we should get rid of, or modify, the balanced budget law in Ohio. Almost everyone agrees that the greatest economic error of judgment in American history came in 1932 when Herbert Hoover insisted on balancing the budget in the face of a severe recession. It took an economy on a down slide and threw it into an abyss that created the decade we call the Great Depression. And now we have Republicans in the federal government trying to do the same thing and, to make things worse, we have about fifty Hubert Hoovers doing it to state budgets. The widely respected economist Paul Krugman wrote, "..state-level cutbacks range from small acts of cruelty to giant acts of panic..", and that was in 2008. Those small acts of cruelty are no longer small.

We need to call our State representatives who are in a state of panic, peel them down down off of the ceiling and tell them to make those that have been getting richer while the rest of us get poorer to anti up.

Here is the Paul Krugman article I quoted from.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1

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