Governor Ted Strickland tried to demonstrate his fiscal discipline by noting in his State of the State speech the distribution of funding changes for state departments. Under his budget, two departments would get cut, nine get flat or below inflation funding increases and seven get (above inflation) funding increases.

Here’s another way of looking at it: there were 18 departments before the Strickland budget and there are 18 departments after the Strickland budget, that is, nothing was eliminated.

Last year, a net of 16,600 jobs were lost in Ohio. And since June 2000, a net of 207,000 jobs have been lost.

With so many jobs and the incomes that pay for government eliminated, shouldn’t some of our government be eliminated as well?

Would someone in the legislature or the media please ask this question of the governor or his staff?

If the governor truly wants to “live within our means,” and offer a change of direction from the Taft Administration, then a fiscally prudent “turn around Ohio” budget would have offered cuts.

For example, offering a budget supporting just 17 departments.

What to cut? My vote would be the Ohio Department of Education.

Why? This government bureaucracy contributes virtually nothing to the actual education of Ohio’s children. Our public schools functioned adequately for over a hundred years without the department.

While it may be too much to blame the abysmal levels of attainment in many Ohio schools on the department – 115,000 kids today are trapped in big city schools rated academic watch or academic emergency – the record at least speaks to the department’s costly impotence.

Or perhaps the department in practice serves other goals than teaching our kids to read and write?

Don’t worry, this isn’t an anti-education diatribe or even an anti-state control comment: the needed functions of state interest in local schools could be easily distributed to other parts of government.

Monitor the accountability of local schools? Give the job to the state auditor. Distributing state school finance dollars? Assign this task to the state treasurer.

Setting standards and curriculum? We need national standards for a global economy applied at the local level. Who needs the state involved in this? The locals can dial up Washington, D.C. as easily as anyone at the Ohio Department of Education can.

Policy-wise, it is not really so hard to cut wasteful state government spending.

The challenge lies in the politics of accomplishing true change in state government.

David Hansen
President, Buckeye Institute

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