Each Friday, Eye on the Statehouse will announce its “Porker of the Week.” It’s our way of calling attention to a particularly big spender.

This week’s Porker is the proposed state budget. There is no better example of big government than in this 2,031 page whopper. If you were to read through the budget as if it were a book, page across page, you would have to scan 1,400 feet of pages. Imagine three Washington Monuments on top of each other and you’ve got the idea of what a long read it is.

At the same time, the bill is a figurative monument to Statehouse logrolling. Unlike in the federal government and other states, all kinds of spending are put into one spending bill in Ohio.

The budget holds spending for education together with spending on wasteful corporate welfare. It holds spending on property tax relief together with spending on state bureaucracies such the cosmetology board and the state geologist.

When the good is packaged in with the bad, an Ohio legislator who wants to vote “yes” on spending on education or for property tax relief is also forced into voting “yes” for gifts to business, or to maintain meaningless bureaucracies, or on virtually every other spending program lacking the political support to survive a clean up or down vote on its own.

In Ohio, wasteful and unneeded pork barrel spending thrives when it is shielded by such entrenched logrolling. If a spending measure can’t win a vote on its own but has to be packaged with the fundamental programs of government such as education or public safety, perhaps this is a sign that it isn’t a good use of tax dollars.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The federal budget moves through Congress in the form of some thirteen bills each requiring their own vote to be adopted.

Closer to home and more similar in size, the Minnesota and Michigan state budgets move through their legislatures in four or five parts. In these two states, a legislator can cast a vote in favor of spending for schools without being forced to vote to spend on virtually every other questionable state spending item. The reason is that the school aid spending bill is separate from the state departments bill, which is separate from the health and human services bill, and so on.

Legislators are able to vote “yes’” on education spending or other essentials of state government and then vote “no” on corporate welfare and the like.

Logrolling isn’t completely eliminated in these states – and “earmarks” were invented in Congress as a means to accomplish the ends of logrolling — but it is certainly more limited.

Eye on the Statehouse argues that their citizens enjoy more transparency in spending votes than do Ohioans. They also get more accountability for all of their state’s spending programs as the more questionable programs enjoy less “shielding” from popular spending than in Columbus.

But that just means more work for your Eye on the Statehouse correspondents as they shine a light on Ohio spending.

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