by Harvey Wasserman, Apr 29, 1998

George Voinovich has a way with words.

Out stumping for Prop 2, what he says is simple: "All you homeowners, this won't cost you a cent!!"

That's how the Republican legislature rode an Ohio Supreme Court decision into this regressive travesty of a school funding package.

Take a billion in sales taxes. Give homeowners $500 million in "relief", allowing them to break roughly even.

So who pays the actual money that goes to fund the schools?

Obviously, THE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T AFFORD TO OWN HOUSES.

Selling this scam depends on the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Or on everybody who owns no home not voting.

And though this aims directly at those who can least afford it, Prop 2 isn't even the half of it.

How about that Ohio Lottery? Weren't the immense profits pouring in from this tax-the-poor scam supposed to fund -- you guessed it -- EDUCATION!!! Opponents who warned from the start that the Lottery takes most heavily from the desperate have been proven right. Those who can least afford it are precisely those who lose the most.

But at least the money goes to fund the schools, right?

Guess again. As opponents warned, the profits from the Lottery have merely oozed into general operating funds. Voino and the Lege have cooked the books to use that money for tax cuts and corporate welfare to go to hose needy campaign contributors. Who needs casino gambling when Ohio's well-to-do can use the administration to run their own?

Which brings us to Big Rip #3. Now officially in the legislative hopper is the Mead-Johnson utility deregulation bill.

In all fairness, Sen. Bruce Johnson and Rep. Priscilla Mead have held a long series of open hearings, which have been sorely lacking in other states (most notably, California) resulting in far worse utility deregulation bills. These mega-scams involve huge bailouts for bad utility investments, like nuclear power plants such as our own Perry and Davis-Besse. They also incorporate big rate cuts for industrial users of electricity while sticking it to -- you guessed it -- individual consumers.

The California bill even allows private dunning agencies to market the information contained in your electric bill!

Overall, electric deregulation has became a national scam aimed at trading regulated monopolies for unregulated ones. The idea that competition will enter the mix is as far-fetched as Newt Gingrich banning corporate welfare.

Here in Ohio, Mead-Johnson would take generating plants and other utility property off the tax roll, substituting a tax on electricity consumed. A tax which you can bet the big users will circumvent, leaving guess who to once again pick up the slack -- in this case to the tune of about $250 million annually.

In California and Massachusetts, vehement grassroots opposition has put statewide anti-dereg repeal measures on the 1998 ballot. Sooner or later, we'll probably have to go that route here.

In the meantime, education remains the most important function our community performs. It benefits everyone.

Teachers are the most important public servants we have, and they are grossly underpaid.

There is ample money being skimmed off by the rich through our grotesquely unfair tax system to fund our state and national school systems ten times over.

Despite the end of the cold war, we still blow $300 billion a year on a ridiculously bloated military budget which protects us from no one. We spend more on war toys than the next ten nations on earth combined. And less on educating our kids too many of them, with predictable results.

It's a lottery everybody loses, even the rich. It's time we did something about it -- something fair and reasonable.