Dave the Doink Strikes Again
Suing the federal government over the wildly popular coronavirus relief package is typical Dave Yost fuckery.
When former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland drained the Rainy Day Fund after a cabal of cocaine-addicted bankers melted the world economy, the Koch Brothers and the Republicans campaigned against the move like it wasn’t a necessity to keep the state afloat.
The gambit worked, and in response the state elected Tea Party warrior John Kasich to fix our state’s ills. Kasich now presents himself as a moderate because that’s what he needs to do to keep cashing CNN’s checks since he’s a political persona non grata back home where he’s reviled on both sides of the aisle.
One of his most controversial moves, other than, you know, trying to close every abortion clinic in the state, was raiding the Local Government Fund and diverting roughly $1.5 billion into his precious Rainy Day Fund.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t pay taxes so my money can be managed by some hedge fund hobgoblin. I pay taxes for mass transit, infrastructure and to the local schools so hopefully they can enjoy such 21st century luxuries as air conditioning. It ain’t much, but hey, at least I pay a higher tax rate than billionaires like Jeff Bezos.
Despite our recovery from the Great Recession, the local governments never got that money back. Municipalities either had to raise taxes on their already decaying tax base or, more easily, simply slash services. We saw that in cities from Columbus to Greenville and everywhere in between.
The American Rescue Plan is not a perfect bill. However, this is truly an example of not letting “pretty damn good” be the enemy of perfect.
It is bipartisan in a way we’re not used to seeing in America. Of course not one Republican in Congress could find the fortitude to deliver relief to the working people and small businesses they swear they support — though many of them are hawking the benefits to their voters on the assumption that they’re idiots who don’t pay attention their individual votes — but it turns out getting free money and saving city budgets and small businesses and slashing child poverty in half is popular with 70% of the country.
That amounts to popularity among pretty much anyone who doesn’t go home and mainline Fox News propaganda every night before eating a TV dinner and going to bed at 8 p.m.
The bill is a lifeline to states and cities which will inevitably see revenues fall off a cliff. Or how you could present this to your Republican friends: This bill ensures that municipalities won’t have to lay-off cops so they can keep them safe from Antifa pillaging their houses while they sleep.
Of course keeping as many cops on the street as possible doesn’t sit well with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a “law-and-order” clown of a man whose hobbies include routinely getting laughed out of federal court. (Keep in mind he belongs to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which financed robocalls to Trump voters encouraging them to storm the Capitol on January 6th.)
There is a provision in the bill that ensures the states cannot take this money and use it to pay for tax cuts. This makes sense for anyone familiar with the id of Republicans. These jackals love nothing more than seizing power and then throwing money at the corporations and rich fucks that financed their campaigns in the first place. It was literally the only thing the administration of President Business Deals accomplished in the two years in which the GOP controlled every branch of federal government.
Yost, a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative, can’t abide by this policy that ensures money goes to those it was intended. He is mad enough to waste an untold amount of public money in court trying to sue the federal government.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com:
Yost said in an interview Wednesday that the tax-cut ban the Democratic-controlled Congress added to the $350 billion in state and local government aid violate states’ rights to set their own tax policy.
“This gets right into the nitty gritty. It’s the United States of America, not the federal government of America,” said Yost, a Republican.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure the federal government has every right to put stipulations on how states spend federal money. I also know if Yost is arguing in court, there’s a good chance he’ll get tossed on the street like the uncharismatic bum that he is.
No, what this will most likely accomplish is to unnecessarily delay critical funding to our municipalities meant to offset the economic fallout from a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
But in typical Yost fashion, he only cares about garnering headlines so he can go to GOP voters in his next run for office and boast about how “he’s not scared to take on the federal government.”
Win or lose, he will of course have done that at their own expense; but hey, it’s not like this would be the first time he picked their pockets and earned a promotion.
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