LocutusOfBoard

Casinos sure turned around Detroit. I mean their population even grew. :roll: What makes people think casinos will do well for Ohio? They should focus on real reforms like tax cuts, and perhaps a right-to-work law. That might create employment in sectors that actually do good things for Ohioans. Oh no, those are evil conservative concepts! Better to run our state into the ground than that! :drunk: The saddest part is that we are actually having this discussion of legalizing gambling in the first place. Have we fallen as far as New Orleans? Detroit? I think if Bob Taft had cut taxes and spending during the last recession instead of raising them, we might have 200,000 more jobs right now, and better prospects for the future.

No Sir I don't like it.

People in Toledo sobbed about the Lion store for a while, but then they realized that Dillards offers better prices and better sales. Few people in Toledo miss Lion's to tell you the truth. The Dillard store at the Southwyck mall sees very little demand. They discount high quality merchandise very rapidly, and it stays on the racks for a long time. That's where I get all my Tommy Hilfiger shirts, most of them for less than $20.

Buckeye Chuck? Is that Punxatawney Phil's hillbilly cousin? :lol: :evil:

Everything you've stated sounds like propaganda from the teachers unions. In NYC, lots of Asian immigrants come in speaking little English each year, but eventually outperform the American born blacks and HIspanics studying in the same schools. How are the former able to outperform the latter under the same allegedly crappy conditions? We can raise the income taxes until they are 90%. We can tax people in the suburbs to the point that they practically starve to death. And we can put all that money into city schools hiring new teachers. But there is no proof that that is going to make the kids perform, when they are not as smart to begin with and have little interest in learning. Well there's no need to do that here in America because the GDP per capita is much higher. It's easy to give students all kinds of opportunities here that are impossible in the 3rd world :clap: The point is that even our ghetto schools have more resources than schools in the rest of the world. But they are not producing results. Why? Because of the students, that's why.

The schools in America are very well funded. I lived in India for a year, and during that time I went to school in what was basically a mud hut, with no fans, no lights, no blackboard, and a dirt floor. The temperatures during the daytime would hit 100 degrees. During lunchtime, it was a struggle to keep the cockroaches off your food. And if you answered a question incorrectly during class, the teacher would beat you with a stick :whip:, in accordance with Indian pedagogical traditions. :drunk: Still there are people studying in that environment, and going on to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and what not. All this talk of inner cities schools iin America needing more money is garbage. Those who have the propensity to study will get ahead, even in 3rd world conditions. Therre is perfectly sufficient funding in inner city schools. In many of these schools, they get more money altogether (with federal and state grants and what not) that the overall spending per student exceeds that of nearby suburban districts (e.g. Washington DC). It's not fair to say the schools are crap. The schools have crappy performance because the kids they take aren't that bright to begin with. That may not be a PC thing to say, but those are the facts. The teaching in urban schools gets dumbed down because most of the students need to be taught at a lower level, and taught more slowly. That was what my friend told me who worked in inner city schools in MI after graduating from college. So parents whose kids are bright and show academic promise pull their kids out of the urban public schools and put them in private schools or they move to the suburbs. Also, a lot of the urban kids are just troublemakers. They get violent and beat people, especially the "nerds" who do well academically in class. That's even more incentive for people to flee the cities. So called "poor" people here in America complain about how hard they have it, but pretty much all of them except the most destitute panhandlers have it better off in terms of material wealth and opportunities here in the "ghettos" of America than my relatives back in India, who are rich by Indian standards. When it comes to poor performance of urban American students, I agree that something needs to be done. But the solutions offered by the Republican and Democratic parties are not going to work. The Republicans talk of increased "Accountability" from school teachers is meaningless, because the schoolteachers aren't the problem, its the kids they have to deal with. And the Democrats talk of putting more money into the districts (as a payoff to schoolteachers unions) isn't going to deliver results either (e.g. Washington DC schools still have poor performance).

Why was Cincinnati's airport built in Kentucky? There's a lot of money to be made from an airport. Why didn't Ohio make a play for it?

Our state has economic problems. We have the 4th highest tax burden in the country. That's just untenable. Our governor raised taxes during a recession in which he should have been cutting spending. Of course that led to 200,000 job losses. It's amazing that our overall population hasn't declined. Bob Taft seems to have gotten religion though. It's probably because the state GOP lost seats in the last election, one in which the GOP in the rest of the country gained seats pretty much everywhere. :drunk: He's talking about tax cuts, and spending restraints. :clap: I'm skeptical if he will actually be strong enough to carry it out, or if he will cave into the unions. But it's a step in the right direction. Beyond that though, Ohio's image sucks. People think of Ohio as being a boring agrarian place. They think it is populated with corn growing, cow tipping dullards. Nobody wants to live in such a state. You know, Ohio is not much different demographically, politically, and economically from Michigan, but Michigan projects a much better image to young people and business leaders because of its association with automobiles. Wisconsin has an association with dairy cows, but its done in a way that's sort of campy and oddly hip at the same time (e.g. Cheeseheads). I don't know what kind of image our state should project, but it should preferably be something non-agricultural. It might be worthwhile to hire an ad agency or two to figure out ways market Ohio. And then we should market Ohio, nationally, internationally, to young people and to business leaders, in a way that is cool and confident. Sure tax cuts are important, but you also have to spend money to make money. And to think big. :mrgreen: Consider this: 10 years ago, the word "Utah" summoned up images of deranged, gun toting Mormon mountain men with multiple wives. But now people think of sexy snowboarders and lots of tech companies. Did the state of Utah actually change so much? You still can't buy beer in Salt Lake City after 6 from what I've heard. But the leaders of Utah skilllfully crafted a new image. And now the world's top CEOs are tripping overthemselves to setup new operations in Salt Lake City. If Utah can reinvent themselves in such a short span, so can Ohio.

That's my point: if our state was better known nobody out there would confuse them for fear of looking stupid. No one confuses New Mexico and New York, or even New York and New Jersey. People think our state is filled with desperate rednecks. :( It's like our whole state's reputation now rides on Columbus, the only growing city, and the only place attracting young people and "new economy" jobs. Make us proud Columbus! :clap: I'm sure if Jerry Springer was running the state people would know where Ohio was on the map. :drunk: God help us all. :evil:

Interesting read: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0885702.html Our state grew pretty fast until about 1960. Since then we have been losing electoral college votes. :cry: In the first half of this decade our state grew .7% comparaed to 3.3% for the U.S. as a whole. Our neighbors aren't doing as badly, BTW. It's painful to see Ohio lose stature and respect. Someone posted on another thread about how they went to California, and when they said they werre from Cleveland, people responded as if they were from Iowa. Well, that's what happens when you go from being a big state to a little state. 50 years ago, everyone knew and respected Cleveland as a world class metropolis. Now folks think it's a cowtown. It's a reflection on the state as a whole. Damnit, we need some more people living here.

OI is done as far as I've heard too. Toledo is trying very hard to have a strong downtown and there is a housing market starting to grow there, but it's hard when big businesses like OI get offered these huge incentives by Perrysburg to move their company there. Toledo did their best, but at some point you have to realize that it's a lost cause. Toledo gave huge tax breaks to Jeep to stay in the city that it couldn't afford. The city needs all the money it can to spend on the schools and a vastly understaffed police force. The burbs in Toledo are not the place to be right now. Most people in the area want downtown to go back to what it was in 1960 when twice as many people worked there. It's just getting quite difficult to keep business there when they can operate more cheaply in a suburb like Perrysburg. Toledo is trying hard? I wish they were. Toledo is "wanting hard", "hoping hard", but they are not "trying hard". They have anti-business policies, a corrupt union contolled tax+spend city council, and a lazy mayor with a lower IQ than Carty Finkbeiner. They have done nothing to improve the business climate of Toledo. Their policy of handing out tax breaks is counter productive. They would be better served by cutting taxes across the board, which would be more fair to all companies and more pro-growth. But their anti-corporate mentality prevents them from doiing that, and that is why Toledo will continue to pay the price as the suburbs prosper. When Carty led the "Keep Jeep" campaign, that was a herculean effort that kept jobs in Toledo. The difference between a city like Toledo and say, a Phoenix, AZ or a Madison, WI, or even a Chicago, IL is that their politicians make that kind of effort to bring/create jobs every single day, whereas here in Toledo it happens once every ten years. :-(

Our state has a reputation for being flat which is mostly unfounded. Florida is the flattest state in the country, but I've never heard anyone use "Florida" and "flat" in the same sentence. You say "flat land" and people only think of the Midwest, of which Ohio is the most prominent state, IMO. The whole eastern and southern parts of Ohio are pretty hilly. Even Columbus is not totally flat. The only flat place is NW Ohio. There are some people from Utah in my class who were complaining about how flat Ohio is. I'm going to give them binoculars and point them to the SouthEast. :lol:

I'm intrigued by that picture of the Appalachians South East of Columbus. I think I will also climb one of the downtown towers to get a look of them. Very interesting. Did you have to use a zoom lens to take that picture? I wonder if they are visible from street level in the South Eastern suburbs of Columbus.