Maggie's Farm

Kaisch is not a fiscal conservative, and not likely to save Ohio. His budget is up, not down, from his predecessor. He pushed "co-investment" of tax dollars, which as you pointed out directly above the Kaisch article, is simply crony capitalism. And there are plenty of ORPINOs left in the government and in the populace.

No one has the guts to take on Ohio's problems, b/c like an addict, Ohio's populace likes the drug that causes its distress. Strickland wasn't the problem, heck he wasn't even as bad as Taft. And Taft and Voinovich left far more ruin than Celeste.

There are lessons to be learned from Ohio, but you have to go back father than 2001. The state that produced Edison and Rockefeller, provided a home for Goodrich and Procter&Gamble, and most certainly remembered for Sherman, Grant, Neil Armstrong, and 8 presidents (some of whom were actually ok) is worth paying attention to.

Ohio's lesson is about populism, and how easy it is to destroy prosperity by reducing standards and giving handouts to everyone who comes to suckle on success, not generate it.

Ohio has a lot of resources, a lot of reserves and a large population w/ some talented people in it. It's won't disappear tomorrow. But it is in its death throes, and they've grown noticably worse in my 20+ years as an adult observing the state.

The small cities are dead. And in the semi-rural areas surrounding them there's barely enough resources for one more generation to be raised with enough training and chutzpah to flee like several befor them.

The big cities are hollowed out ghettos. Cleveland isn't even interesting enough to be a joke anymore. Youngstown is a violent mire, with routine promises of a renaissance by politicians so corrupt that they don't even bother with a charette as pretense. People don't even know where Toledo is, and it's so closely tied to Detroit that it's already been written off by the state, following the path Akron and Canton. Cincy has seen racial strife over non-existant issues, a perfect representation of the state that has no vision and no hope, just pent up potential directed toward malice. Cincy's urban population has declined so much and so fast that it's almost smaller than Toledo. The suburbs still hold affluence, but that's shrinking in both quantity and quality. People are leaving for the coasts.

And then there's Columbus. The great pillager of the state. It has been sucking the state dry of resources, while providing nothing but college football and basketball success for decades. And now that it has drained that well dry, the emptiness of politicans and state bureaucrates shows throughout. The town has been invaded by Somalis, driving lower class neighborhoods to ghettos. The communities that do persist are yuppie enclaves, filled with lazy, soulless bureaucrats and pencil pushers who don't even have the nobility of the bourgeois portrayed in 'The Death of Ivan Illych'.

Ohio is done. Put a fork in the Buckeye state. The best that can be hoped for is a mass exodus of the parasites that fill the state. Hopefully they'll move to Chicago. Let the hard-working farmers and ranchers do their thing and produce, both the food and goods we need, and a generation that knows that hard work leads to success.

"Just imagine if this were a school"

Compare and contrast the NYC public schools being defended by the unions and NAACP, with this story

http://www.theroot.com/buzz/13-year-old-bronx-girl-heads-college/?gt1=38002

a girl whose father chose to homeschool.