Obama in Ohio Today to Promote Tax-and-Spend, While Kasich & Co. Promote Jobs and Growth

President Obama is visiting Ohio today to “promote” his “jobs plan” (“promote” is the word in the Associated Press headline).

What he's promoting is really a bill which is Stimulus II funded almost entirely with tax increases. Ron Bonjean at US News describes the “Jobs Plan” as a vehicle which “has turned into cynical maneuver that is no longer focused on creating jobs, but on scoring campaign points.”

Though I don't have the list of those Mr. Obama plans to meet, I suspect Buckeye State Governor John Kasich is not among them. That's a shame.

Under Kasich, according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ohio has added 79,000 seasonally adjusted jobs during the first seven months of this year, while the U.S. has a whole gained 872,000. If the entire country was adding jobs at Ohio's rate, that number would be over 2 million.

Instead of promoting a misnamed “jobs plan,” Kasich & Co. are promoting job creation and economic growth without tax increases and while controlling spending. While it's still too early in the fiscal year to break out the party favors, as seen in the State's August Budget Report (fairly large PDF obtainable here), Ohio's tax receipts during the past two months are up by over 11% compared to the same two months a year ago (2% ahead of budget), while spending (including interagency transfers) is down by 6% (2.8% below budget).

Too bad for the rest of the U.S. that the President won't consider doing at a federal level what Kasich & Co. are doing in Ohio — which is why Mr. Kasich's pointed response several months ago to a presidential complaint remains on target today:

Kasich (internal link added by me):

… I was Chairman of the (U.S. House) Budget Committee and was the chief architect of the last time we balanced the budget.

And here in Ohio, we, we have balanced our budget here, under the budget that we have presented, along with preserving the tax cut.

The President of the United States has I think a $13 trillion debt. Why doesn't he do his job? And when he does his job and gets our budget balanced and starts to prepare a future for our children, then maybe he can have an opinion on what's going on in Ohio.

The President hasn't done that, and has since shown himself to be the principal obstacle to doing that.

The national debt is now over $14.7 trillion.