Good morning all. Here’s what’s going on today in news.
Two high-level Cincinnati Park Board officials are under investigation by the Ohio Ethics Commission, The Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The commission has issued a subpoena related to the board’s director Willie Carden and financial manager Marijane Klug — who have both been caught up in a past ethics investigation over bonus pay — though it’s unclear what the current investigation entails. In 2013, the two were found to have improperly received tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses between 2004 and 2010 from the Park Board’s private foundation. The connections between the private foundation and the board, and the way money flows between the two, has been subject to a number of questions and controversies. The most recent ethics commission subpoena doesn’t mean Carden or Klug have committed any crimes, but is an inquiry into whether any laws have been broken. The Enquirer submitted a records request for the subpoena, which Cincinnati City Solicitor Paula Boggs Muething says should be public record. However, the board has hired its own attorney, James Helmer, whi argues that release of the subpoena is a violation of state law and is refusing to provide it.
• So. You just paid your taxes, probably, or are about to. Do you know what your tax rate is? It may well be higher than some of Cincinnati’s biggest corporations. Some huge companies with Cincinnati ties have benefited greatly from federal tax breaks, a new report by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows. Procter & Gamble, for instance, ranks 10th in the country on the Institute’s list of tax subsidy recipients, having scored more than $8.5 billion in subsidies between 2008 and 2015. That puts P&G’s tax rate at about 22 percent — well below the supposed U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent, and below the 25 percent tax rate the average middle-class American pays. But wait, there’s more. You may already know this, but some large, profitable companies don’t pay taxes at all some years. That’s true for General Electric, which has a large presence in Greater Cincinnati. GE ranks number six on the tax breaks list. Over the same eight-year period, the company had $40 billion in profits but paid an effective -3.4 percent tax rate. I should stop doing my taxes myself and hire one of these guys’ tax lawyers.
• The state of Ohio could lose between $19 and $26 billion if a plan by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act goes into effect. The state would see those massive cuts over six years as the House plan reduces federal money for the ACA’s Medicaid expansion by capping federal contributions over time and prohibiting states from enrolling new recipients to the expansion in 2020. That would mean deep cuts to the federal health care program, which serves 3 million Ohioans. Ohio spent $28 billion in state and federal funds on Medicaid last year.
• The GOP plan has been met with serious pushback, and not just from Democrats. Ohio Gov. John Kasich yesterday again condemned the cuts to health care funding in stark terms. Kasich fought Republican state lawmakers in 2013 to accept the expansion from the federal government and has been a vocal opponent of attempts to dismantle the expanded program. More than 700,000 people in Ohio are insured by the expansion.
“We’re talking about lives,” Kasich said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We better be careful we’re not losing the soul of our country because we’re playing politics.”
• Finally, another contender has entered the race to replace Kasich when he’s term-limited out of office next year. Former State Rep. Connie Pillich, a Democrat from Montgomery, announced yesterday that she’s running for governor. Since her election in 2008, Pillich has been a resilient politician in a state and district that hasn’t been friendly to Democrats. She grabbed a narrow re-election victory from tea party activist Mike Wilson in 2010. Then her district was redrawn by Republican lawmakers to make it even more red. But she prevailed again over Wilson in 2012 despite that. Pillich ran for state treasurer against Josh Mandel in 2014 and lost, though her defeat wasn’t as resounding as other statewide Ohio Democratic candidates that year. The former Air Force officer joins two other Democratic candidates — Ohio Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni and U.S. Rep. Betty Sutton — as well as four potential GOP candidates, including Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor and U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2017.
