BuckeyeBlog

A mystery has been solved: The federal government has acted to give Ohio freedom to modify its programs for punishing school districts educating children.

Thanks to our readers.

The Enquirer reported on Drake Hospital’s recent turnaround over two weeks ago, but it is a story worth revisiting for further thought:

Three years ago, the long-term rehabilitation hospital was losing more than $10 million a year, slightly less than Hamilton County taxpayers were pumping into it annually to keep the facility afloat. Its costs were 70 percent higher than those of other hospitals. Its chief executive officer was making more than $400,000. Meanwhile, the center was operating at 45 percent of capacity and its supporters lived in fear it would close.

Drake’s only hope was to take a dose of strong medicine. In 2005, Hamilton County commissioners ceded control of the center to the Health Alliance. The old board was dismantled, the administrative team fired, employee benefits slimmed down, and its budget and admissions policies overhauled.

The privatization not only stabilized the care center, it saved it. Now center administrator Karen Bankston, senior vice president at Drake for the Health Alliance, predicts a $9 million surplus by the end of the fiscal year. Equally important, the center has bumped up admissions and is hoping to open its doors to hundreds of Iraq war veterans with brain injuries and land a highly coveted Department of Defense contract for their care.

Alliance officials say the turnaround has been so successful that they’ll no longer need public funds after a Hamilton County operating levy expires next year.

The Drake story offers yet more evidence that private health care is superior to the public health care systems endorsed by certain major presidential candidates. May it serve as a candle, however dim, for an American public currently stumbling around in the dark when it comes to effective health care solutions.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court dismissed a public nuisance lawsuit against Sherwin Williams. Unfortunately, the suit filed by disgraced former Attorney General Marc Dann against this Ohio company remains, as does the suit filed by the city of Columbus. Perhaps this common sense ruling from Rhode Island will cause both the state of Ohio and the city of Columbus to stop wasting taxpayer dollars to harass this company with their baseless lawsuits.

David Owsiany wrote an excellent Viewpoint for the Buckeye Institute last year explaining the flaws of the “public nuisance” theory:

Public nuisance is a relatively obscure and narrow legal theory that permits a government entity to take action to stop or abate the impact of specific unreasonable behavior that causes injury to a public right. For example, under the public nuisance theory, a city may take action to stop someone from blasting their radio when people are picnicking in a public park or to force responsible parties to abate the damage caused by their dumping of sewage into a public river. Public nuisance law, however, has little applicability in the lead paint context.

Lead paint is only dangerous when it peels or flakes, releasing a fine dust that when ingested can cause lead poisoning. Accordingly, proper maintenance of older buildings over the last three decades, including a fresh coat of non-lead paint, would have dramatically reduced the threat of lead poisoning. Most paint companies, including the Ohio-based Sherwin-Williams Company, which is one of the companies named in Columbus’ lawsuit, stopped selling lead-based paints long before the federal government banned its use in 1978.

Misusing public nuisance law as a means to shake down paint companies for selling, what was at the time, a legal product more than forty years ago, ignores the traditional legal standards for liability, including proving that a product defect caused a specific harm. Such litigation also disregards the negligence of owners who failed to maintain their properties in a reasonable fashion, especially in light of the well-known threat caused by allowing buildings with lead paint to deteriorate.

The usually excellent Jennifer Smith Richards must have been dozing a bit yesterday, or possibly her editor was, or both. Here’s a nice little story about Ohio’s changing it’s silly “grading” system for public schools and the consequences. Apart from an equally silly statement that the old system was designed “to punish struggling schools” (maybe it was designed to help students? Save the OEA press releases for later) the story does a nice job of describing one of the basic problems of the No Child Left Behind concept that 100 percent of children will be above average. It even quotes Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan, always a plus.

Just one thing, though. Who did this scrapping? Was it one of state Rep. Larry Wolpert’s bills to reform education? (Presumably not, since the state legislature must “still approve the new plan.”) Was it an action by Gov. Strickland? The Ohio Department of Education? The federal Department of Education? Did someone issue an executive order? Write a letter? Approve a waiver request? We sort of know why, and some aspect of it happened yesterday, but who, what, and where?

Old Del Latta, excuse me, Bob Latta (who says we don’t have royalty), thinks “It’s very important that we thank farmers in this district and in this state right before people cast votes for me.”

Maybe I paraphrased that last bit.

Okay. Farmers feed us. Less than one percent, feeding the world, etc. But what about the bolt manufacturers? I bet it’s way less than 1 percent of the population working in the bolt industry, and what if we lost them tomorrow? All our tractors would fall apart, not to mention everything else. Everybody’d be sitting on their arses on the Interstates, like in one of those insurance and/or global warming commercials, pretending to drive a car the way a six-year-old might, but not having any car to drive.

Do you want that? Do ya? Huh? Let’s hear it for the bolt manufacturers, and maybe give them a little subsidy, what?

(I think the Blade just wanted an excuse to use the phrase, “cleans teats” in a news story. But give them kudos for the closing sentence: “Farmers know when manure is being spread by politicians.” Only, I don’t think it means what the farmers think it means.)

Your tax dollars are being used to give a little welfare to Warren Buffett:

NetJets Aviation and sister company FlightSafety International were formally awarded state job-creation tax credits valued at $26.4 million yesterday. 

The credits were part of $67 million worth of incentives offered in March to persuade NetJets to keep its base in Columbus. …

Retaining the two companies, both controlled by billionaire Warren Buffett, is expected to save 2,000 jobs in Ohio and generate more than 800 jobs in the next several years.

This kind of thing puts Mr. Buffett’s opposition to the repeal of the estate tax in perspective: if the government was confiscating less of your money it wouldn’t be able to give these cushy tax breaks to companies he owns.

A lot of Congressmen, Senators, and pundits are blaming oil speculators for the rise in energy prices. I’ve already noted on this blog Bob Murphy’s excellent piece explaining the role of speculators and why attacking them illustrates a fundamental ignorance of economic markets. Now Fortune has an interesting piece showing what happens in the real world when you ban speculation. Back in the 1950s onion farmers were able to convince Congress to ban speculation for their commodity. The results?

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics’ belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings. Since 2006, oil prices have risen 100%, and corn is up 300%. But onion prices soared 400% between October 2006 and April 2007, when weather reduced crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only to crash 96% by March 2008 on overproduction and then rebound 300% by this past April.

If politicians have their way and oil speculation is curtailed or banned, you will likely see something similar in the oil market.

Hat tip to the Cato Institute’s excellent blog.

Britain’s famed Winston Churchill once quipped that “men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” The Enquirer editorial board once again stumbled blindly over the truth and hurried on in its Monday criticism of proposed changes to the Ohio Smoking ban:

Worried about its effect on bars, private clubs and other businesses, Sen. Bob Schuler has introduced legislation he says will spell out exemptions for family-owned businesses, patios and private clubs…
But while the proposed legislation might broaden private-club language in a sensible way, it would blast a hole through language restricting smoking in family-owned businesses. The broad proposed language would allow smoking in any free-standing, family-owned business - adding thousands of public smoking spots across the state.
Besides giving family-owned businesses a loophole not available to their competitors, the revised language would blatantly undercut Ohioans’ expectations for the legislation - that smoking would be widely banned in public places, including restaurants, bars and other businesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s their own little kitty, isn’t it? Kudos to the Vindicator.

A former township trustee can’t serve in a position he voted to create. . . .

He said that he and Brashen had no idea when they voted to create the position that Moracco would resign from his trustee job.

Brashen also could not be reached to comment.

Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul Gains said trustees contacted his office Monday and “I have given them the law.”

He declined to discuss what he told trustees, citing attorney-client privilege.

According to Ohio Revised Code, during a public official’s term of office or within one year thereafter, the official is “prohibited from occupying any position of profit in the prosecution of a public contract authorized by the public official or by a legislative body, commission, or board of which the public official was a member at the time of authorization … .”

Finamore said that a former public official can be hired after resigning if certain criteria are met. The official can’t solicit the job, the official must resign before the job is created, the position must be advertised, an interview process followed, and the appointment must be based on who is the best and most qualified, he said.

Moracco, however, hadn’t resigned when the job was created, Finamore said.

C’mon, guys. Get your timing right. Line up the votes, then resign.

Today’s Columbus Dispatch ran E.J. Dionne’s screed about the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court engaging in activism to reach the decision in the Heller case, striking down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban as unconstitutional. While he throws the term “activism” around, Dionne does not define the term in any meaningful way. Fortunately, the Federalist Society’s blog regarding the recent Supreme Court term includes an interesting discussion about “activism.” Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, provides a useful definition: “the term ‘judicial activism’ succinctly captures the Court’s wrongful invasion of the realm of representative government and the injury that invasion inflicts on the powers of American citizens.”

Under this definition, the U.S. Supreme Court has engaged in liberal judicial activism on numerous occasions, including perhaps most prominently in Roe v. Wade. Regardless of how you feel about abortion as a policy matter, the Roe v. Wade majority went out of its way to invent a right to abortion that is nowhere to be found in the text of the Constitution and effectively struck down state laws regulating abortion across the country. Even liberal scholars agree that the reasoning of Roe is indefensible. Read the rest of this entry »