All the cool kids are calling out John Kasich

Last month I ripped into Ohio House candidate Mike Wilson for his support of gubernatorial candidate John Kasich's plan to phase out the state income tax. Yesterday the Akron Beacon-Journal ran an editorial that went directly at Kasich over the same plan.

First, the state has spent the past five years reducing taxes, individual income tax rates falling by almost 17 percent, the homestead exemption on property taxes expanded and business taxes slashed $1.6 billion annually. Second, Republicans point to Strickland for the state losing 430,000 jobs. Are they saying the tax cuts haven't worked? Or is the fair conclusion that the governor isn't to blame for a national recession?

...[r]emember the Republican majority in the Ohio Senate struggling last year with a relatively puny $851 million deficit? Many in the caucus said no to postponing the final installment of the income tax cut. They failed to come up with a coherent plan for closing the gap through spending cuts. The performance hardly qualified as a profile in leadership. Kasich the candidate must show that he can do better.

It used to be that the Democrats would spend money on programs, run up a little debt, then the republicans would get elected, cut taxes and spending, and then people decided they liked having the programs that got cut so they put the Dems back in office, and the circle went unbroken.

Somewhere along the way - say during the Reagan years - the republicans decided that they could cut taxes and keep spending on programs. For whatever reason, people just stopped questioning the rationality of this line of thinking.

We should probably rethink that, because if Kasich is any indication, the party has no interest in fiscal responsibility of any sort.