National, Ohio Republican budgets prioritize corporate welfare and donor handouts over Ohio families

Yahoo

10-06-2025

The Ohio Statehouse. (Photo by David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal.)
Budget bills being shepherded through Congress and the Ohio Statehouse by Republican majorities are a reflection of priorities. Not mine and maybe not yours, but they are an explicit manifesto of the 'values' most prized by the controlling party.
The federal budget bill and the one being hammered out in Ohio both put a premium on corporate welfare, as opposed to social safety nets, and the continued prosperity of fat cats who write big campaign checks, as opposed to everyone else.
Federal lawmakers — more fearful of upsetting their Dear Leader than screwing their constituents out of healthcare and food aid — are doubling-down to enact a $2.4 trillion-dollar operating budget with unpaid tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the ultra-wealthy and corporations while millions go hungry and lose medical insurance.
Besides the moral depravity of kicking the working-class poor to the curb to reward multi-millionaires and billionaires with lavish tax breaks, this deficit-ballooning monstrosity is predicted to explode the national debt to more than $50 trillion within ten years.
The so-called deficit hawks who howl about paid-for spending budgets that increase revenue, reduce federal deficits, and reverse the unsustainable trajectory of today's roughly $29 trillion in public debt, will ram through the Trump's country club giveaway to the rich. They will vote for what the felon-in-chief (corruptly enriching himself on an epic scale) values above all else — money and power — while bankrupting the country, leaving 11 million Americans uninsured, and forcing countless families to ration meals.
Trump supporters will lose what keeps them afloat, but what matters to the congressional invertebrates who represent them is only what matters to their amoral god king. They will spurn the many who struggle to survive to indulge the few who luxuriate in multiple homes and on super yachts.
While sparse food banks turn away seniors on the edge of poverty and mothers desperate to stave off their children's hunger, the richest Americans will walk away richer, thanks to one party that prioritizes the interests of zillionaires and modern-day robber barons to maintain political dominance.
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Ohio Republicans are using the same playbook as their federal counterparts to hand the wealthiest Ohioans a billion-dollar handout by lowering the state income tax on those making six figures plus with a single flat rate for everybody. But less than 3% of this tax cut would go to the bottom 80% of working Ohioans, according to Policy Matters Ohio.
A tax expert with the nonpartisan research group testified that the other 97% 'goes to Ohioans in the top 20% of earners, making at least $139,000' while the top 1% alone (with an average income of over $1.7 million) rakes in 40% of the tax cut benefits.
So much for equity in a regressive tax code proposal that eliminates graduated brackets for the gated community to pay a higher share of its considerable income.
Who cares if Ohio's general revenue fund takes a 1.1 billion hit in lost revenue as a result? State lawmakers' rational for their fiscally irresponsible tax cuts to the mega-rich is identical to the one congressional Republicans offer for the bulk of their tax cuts going to the richest households and greediest corporations.
It's the old, punctured 'trickle-down theory' that pretends fat cats with fatter wallets ignite economic growth. Proof to the contrary is abundant.
So is evidence that subsidizing billionaire owners of sports teams with public money to build multi-billion-dollar stadiums is a bad bet for taxpayers. But that hasn't stopped leading Republicans in the Ohio Senate and Ohio House from bending over backward to accommodate Jimmy and Dee Haslams' ask for $600 million to take the Browns out of a perfectly good stadium on the lakefront and plop a new one into a working-class suburb right next to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The pols bow to the Haslams as deep-pocketed Republican donors and are committed to finding some way to finance the couple's private interests with public funds.
But the party that engineered gerrymandered supermajorities in the legislature and exerts absolute rule in Ohio insists the state can't find any extra money for food banks (reeling from deep funding cuts under the Trump regime) and has unified around slashing food bank funding by nearly 25% despite rising demand across Ohio.
Republicans also argue that fully funding public education in the state — under a bipartisan spending formula that came closest to meeting long ignored constitutional obligations — is not sustainable under a tight budget. But swelling state investments in a voucher boondoggle predicted to cost $1.25 billion by 2027, according to the Columbus Dispatch, to offset tuition costs for affluent families who can afford the private schools their darlings already attend is sustainable??
Statehouse Republicans blame budget constraints for cutbacks on opioid recovery programs, public libraries, public transit, safe drinking water initiatives, continued Medicaid coverage for kids up to age 3, and even no-cost breakfast and lunch for all Ohio students.
They punted on property tax relief with clawbacks from fiscally responsible school districts yet managed to remove all elected members of the state education board in the Ohio House budget bill.
But cash for brand new stadiums, a billion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy, and an open government spigot for expanded private school vouchers? Those are GOP priorities that value money and power above all else.