LocutusOfBoard

It's unfortunate. I think a lot of people in Ohio would be happier if all the cities shrivelled up and everyone went back to being cow tipping redneck farmers. There is no vision of the future in this state. No hope and no prospects. People need to travel from the NW part of the state to the SE part of the state. This includes people from Ohio, and folks from other states. A proper expressway is needed at least between Toledo and Columbus. But in Ohio there is a fear of expressways, and strange romantic fascination with 2 lane country roads. That hurts progress, along with a lot of other things. NC, SC, and Virginia all have extremely low taxes for their citizens, whereas Ohio has amongst the highest taxes in the nation. But then how is it that these states have money to construct the road, but Ohio does not? It makes you wonder where the money is goiing in this state.

I don't worry about sprawl. I'm pro-growth. :)

And you all thought I was a white guy. :wave:

But I'm not interested in eating seaweed for the rest of my life. Relax. It's this kind of hysteria that leads to completely unnecessary farming subsidies. The U.S. grows half the world's food. Nothing is going to erode that advantage. People eating too much is a far bigger problem than people eating too little because food here is too cheap and plentiful. America's food growing capacity is about as likely to run out as the ocean is likely to lose all its water.

I'm surprised you guys are in favor of it. Is it not contributing to the sprawl? :lol:

I heard somewhere that there are more forests in Ohio today than there were 100 years ago. Does not surprise me one bit. There are more trees in the city of Toledo than there are in the rural areas outside Toledo, which are total farmland.

Some ways of raising taxes are better than others. The best way to raise taxes is property taxes, which does not affect growth as much. Also consumption taxes, such as sales taxes, are also good, despite people complaining about them, in empirical evidence they don't slow down growth as much. To avoid high property taxes people tend to buy smaller places. And to avoid sales taxes, people consume less. Neither of those outcomes is as bad for a state's economy. The worst way is income taxes. Income taxes destroy job growth, especially for good jobs that the state is trying to create. Ohio has 9 income tax brackets. What were they thinking? If you look at the states with no income taxes, that is almost equivalent to the list of states with fastest growing economies.

Farmland doesn't create much economic value. I wouldn't be surprised if one or two GM plants created as much economic output as all of Ohio's corn and soy bean fields put together.

This is a map of unemployment in Ohio: http://lmi.state.oh.us/LAUS/ColorRateMap.pdf The general picture is grim. But in Southeast Ohio it is just disturbing. Columbus is filled with people from the rural Southeastern part of the state who come here lookking for work. They are going where the jobs are. The whole of the state is taxed excessively, jobs are destroyed. Money is used to create public sector employment in Columbus. Some people flee the state, others come to Columbus. It's a spiral of death, because as more and more of the remaining Ohio jobs are government jobs, where are the taxes going to come from that pay for these jobs? I think they tried that in the Soviet Union, but I'm pretty sure it didn't work. :drunk: Virginia, which used to be dirt poor, has passed Ohio in prosperity. And that's the case throughout the South and the West. Pretty soon places like Alabama and Arkansas will have higher per capita incomes than Ohio. Ohio is #1 in the country for college graduates who move elsewhere in search of employment. The middle class is disintigrating, and soon we will be left with a few rich people who can weather Ohio's many self inflicted economic storms, and a huge underclass of the unemployed and underemployed.

Conservatives in Ohio have not forgotten how they were taken for granted over the last eight years and Bennett's luck finally may have run out leading up to the 2006 Republican primary for governor. Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a conservative barely tolerated among Ohio's liberal Republican establishment, has promised a run against anointed Party favorite Jim Petro who currently serves as Attorney General. Although Petro doesn't fit Bob Taft's run as a conservative -- govern as a liberal mold, conservative groups statewide have thrown support behind Blackwell with the hope of breaking the strangle-hold liberal Republicans have held on the Governorship.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/statefinance.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/statelocal04.html I've seen some different studies that go NY, California, Mass., and then Ohio. But Ohio is almost always in the top 5. Like I've said before, we need to get real. Ohio is not a whole lot different than Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and even Kentucky. None of those states is known for a booming business friendly economy, but they are all more business friendly than Ohio, and thus see more growth than Ohio. Anybody who looks at this region as a place to setup new operations invariably ends up going to one of the other nearby states. Another good read, on how Ohio has fallen in terms of relative wealth: http://www.virginiainstitute.org/viewpoint/2003_14.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/ohio/ Ohio has 9 income tax brackets. Most states have 1 or zero. Taxes in Ohio are not only too high, but they require that you hire an army accountants to sort it out for you if you are in any sort of business, which screws you over if you are just a small business. http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/05/pf/taxes/taxfriendly_2004/

That's the general consensus amongst Republicans.

Bob Taft is not a conservative though. When Bush came to the state, he distanced himself from Taft, because his approval rating is 40%, and that's with Republicans. Bob Taft makes conservative talk during election time, and he has a big name which gets people to vote for him, but when it comes to ruling, he is as liberal as Ted Kennedy. He was against the gay marraige ban which virtually all Republicans and half the Democrats in the state went for. He's never seen a tax increase that he didn't go for. He panders ceaselessly to unions. And he thinks that growth comes from big government spending schemes (failed 3rd frontier initiative). He is about as liberal as you can get in Ohio statewide office.

That's exactly what I was expecting. Bob Taft craps in his pants any time someone mentions the school teachers unions, even though the school teachers unions give 100% of their money and votes to Democrats no matter what. In medicine the problem is with the nursing homes. The legislature in Ohio passed a law which basically lets nursing homes, assisted care living centers, etc. bill the state for lots of $$$. :drunk: That said, I don't think the relationship I proposed is wrong. It's a well known fact that low taxes create growth, because companies preferentially locate their operations to low tax locales. Some places like California can get away with high taxes because they have other pluses like good weather, scenery, etc. We have confiscatory taxes in Ohio (the highest in the flyover country), so it's not surprising that most young people (including myself once I'm done with schooling) have to move elsewhere for work, because there is so little private sector job creation in Ohio.

http://www.toledotalk.com/cgi-bin/comments.pl/16/1049 With our state not growing in population, why are public sector pay rolls exploding at an exponential growth rate? :? It's especially distressing that much of this has happened under Republican rule. Republicans in most other states try to cut government jobs, because most government employees vote Democrat. But Bob Taft has been expediting his own party's destruction. He's scared shitless of public sector unions that donate all their money to Democrats regardless of how he rules. :drunk: I know people in Ohio like to think their state is like New York or California, but it's not. Those states can get away with charging high taxes and having lots of lazy government employees on payrolls because people are willing to pay a high price to live in those states. Ohio is not a whole lot different from Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, or most other states in the "flyover country". We've got the highest taxes after New York and California so of course there is not going to be any growth in this state. The only things certain in Ohio are death, taxes, and more job losses. :evil:

Dublin's high point is the Brazenhead Pub. :drunk:

There are some commercial spaces on Sawmill Road in Dublin which is continous with the Columbus part of the commercial strip. But you can immediatly tell once you arrive in Dublin, because the commercial spaces are much nicer, they are landscaped, etc. There's a architecturally impressive and well landscaped Hummer dealership on 161 near the Wendys' HQ. Also on Muirfield Avery drive there is a small commercial strip. There is a Giant Eagle and a Kroger across the street. But they are both very nice structures built out of brick. I've never seen a shopping plaza as nice as either of them. That must have to do with the Dublin building code. Also there is a very fine European car dealership called MAG, which is housed in a architecturally interesting glass building nearby. Given Dublin's population, there are few strip malls. There are definitely fewer strip malls per population than you see driving around in Columbus. The city of Columbus is nothing but flat road that meet at right angles jam packed with strip malls on either side, and with houses behind them.

Is City Center attached to a hotel? Most urban malls that I've seen are attached to good sized hotels. That creates internal pedestrian traffic.

There are huge oil reserves in Canada that equal the amount of gasoline in all the Middle East. Read up on the Alberta tar sands. Nobody taps them today, because the MIddle Eastern oil is cheaper to extract. We've barely scratched the surface of the Earth's crust. In the 21st century, I think there will be all sorts of deep sea drilling for oil, and deep land drilling as well, in places that we haven't searched yet because the technology is not good enough, or it makes little sense to do so because the MIddle Eastern, Russian, North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and whatever else oil is so cheap and plentiful.

I have a degree from an Ivy League school in Chemistry. I'm capable of making my own judgements on things, thank you very much. I don't get my facts from Greenpeace. From the evidence I have seen, I do believe the gasoline age will last much longer than the doomsaying tree huggers today think it will. When I was in grade school in the 1980's, the public school system tried to brainwash us into thinking all gasoline would be gone by the year 2000. That didn't happen now did it? These claims today that gasoline will run out in 30 years are also BS. The economic reality is that gasoline is never going to technically run out. We will reach a point where gasoline is too limited in supply, too hard to get, and no longer economically feasible. At that point, we will use other energy sources. Today, gasoline is king. For cost, it is unbeatable. When gasoline will no longer be economically feasible is anyone's best guess, but these policies to "conserve" gasoline make little sense, because it just frees up gasoline use for someone else, someone not stupid enough to limit their own economic potential.

City Center is a mall, no? All my friends from OSU do their shopping at Tuttle Crossing mall, a good 12 mile drive. OSU is right outside downtown, BTW. City Center is a doomed concept. If Columbus's downtown had more pedestrian traffic to begin with it would have been better off, but it sadly does not.

The gasoline age has just begun and will likely last for hundreds of years. All this talk of gasoline running out in the next 20 to 30 years is BS. Proven reserves of gasoline have been growing for decades. That trend will not continue forever, but I do believe that we will be able to tap deeper and trickier deposits of oil for a long time to come.

Those people living in New Albany probably pay a lot more taxes than you do. Plus they pay for crap like Columbus's bus system used predominantly by poor people in the city, which depends heavily on subsidies (probably tens of thousands of $ a year per regular rider) to get by. Is that fair? Rich suburbs like New Albany are paying most of the tax dollars that get funneled to welfare programs, and subsidies for crappy urban school districts. Is that fair? :whip: I haven't been to New Albany, but I live outside Dublin, and I will say that the pattern of development in Columbus's suburbs is vastly superior to development within the city limits of Columbus itself. 95% of Columbus is just miles of flat straight roads that meet at right angles at 1 mile intervals, and have ugly strip malls and bland houses/apartment complexes behind them. Ever been to Dublin before? They have built one of the finest communities I have seen in Ohio, or for that matter anywhere in the U.S. The roads are actually curved in Dublin, and they have roundabouts in some places. That breaks up the monotony. Also, there are few strip malls in Dublin. It is very nice. I hear New Albany is the same way, with carefully planned, interesting development.

"The booming downtown condominium market is adding another 49-unit project. " When they use confident terms like that, you know things must be going well. Good for Cincinnati. I will have to come visit sometime.

So what if some money from Ohio goes into the casinos in Indiana? That's not unlawful. That's just how the economy works. We make some goods/services, others make other goods/services. I'm not against gambling. I've been to Vegas many times, although not to gamble which is a foolish activity. I just don't want that crap in my state. I don't want 1000 Mexican guys on the streets handing out postcards for hookers. I don't want senior citizens inserting their social security checks into slot machines. Your obsessing about a small amount of money Ohioans spend in Michigan and Indiana casinos. THink about how much money altogether Ohioans would waste away in gambling if there were casinos closer by, with multiple locations in our own state. Sure, some of that money would create employment for blackjack dealers, cocktail waitresses, toilet scrubbers, etc. but much of it would flow to out of state gambling concerns. And a lot of the wealth of Ohioans, I think predominantly lower-middle class Ohioans and Seniors would be wasted away in the casinos. I don't want that crap in my state. If we were to advance your argument: Pedophiles go to other countries to hump little boys, countries where the cops turn the other way in response to that kind of activity. Maybe we should legalize man-boy love here in Ohio? Surely that will be good for the economy.