Kasich's Budget Years in the Works

Via Plunderbund, the Columbus Dispatch:

Three years ago, John Kasich and his team of advisers began planning to rid Ohio of its income tax.
The plan was to be a part of Kasich's first biennial state budget, assuming that he unseated Democrat Ted Strickland as governor last fall.
Kasich, who talked repeatedly on the campaign trail about eventually eliminating the income tax, succeeded at the ballot box and on Tuesday is to unveil his budget: 800 pages of spending cuts and government revamps.
But there is no plan to eliminate the income tax in this budget; it's one of the few goals that Kasich and company felt they couldn't pursue now because of the difficulty in filling a projected $8 billion shortfall.
Kasich, his budget director, Tim Keen, and other advisers first met with him to discuss gubernatorial budget policies in January 2008, when Strickland had been in office barely a year. In interviews, it's clear that most of what they crafted back then will be a part of the governor's budget today.
Administration officials declined to discuss budget specifics for this story, but the budget is expected to include changes to lower home-health-care and hospitalization costs and expand school-choice programs, plus cuts in local-government funding and efforts to privatize other state agencies.
Kasich, Keen and longtime Kasich aides Wayne Struble and Ben Kanzeg identified core principles for government reform in early 2008. The only original principles not in this budget - eliminating the income tax and reorganizing the Bureau of Workers' Compensation - remain on the governor's radar screen.
Kasich also is expected to pursue an increase in the cost threshold at which prevailing wages must be paid on public construction projects, from $78,000 to $5 million, according to business advocates.
"I don't remember a course correction," said Struble, who is Kasich's policy adviser. "The things we were looking at pursuing haven't changed much over time. Even if there weren't an $8 billion deficit, we'd probably be proposing many of the same things."

What a tool.  During the campaign, he wouldn't go into budget specifics, even though they had been planning these budget cuts for years.  So the budget shortfall just made him keep the income tax, he already knew what he was cutting, he just didn't want to tell voters. Now that is a Profile in Courage.  I sure wish you would have moved to Texas, governor.