A great source of frustration to me when I worked in corporate America was that the people I worked with and who lived in my community would organize their whole lives around a football season, but saw very little need to get excited about the political Super Bowl going on all around them.

This process decides much more about critical choices and opportunities in their lives than sports events do.  I comforted myself with the notion that, in America, we feel comfortable contracting out political decisions when we vote on our representatives, and then we don’t worry about how this is working out until we vote again.

While watching the Super Bowl this past weekend, I couldn’t help thinking that if you are a coach of a football team, all of your constituents want the same thing. They don’t care what the other team or their supporters want.  There is no pretense that either team is trying to please most everybody at the game.  This used to be different than the ideal for representative democracy, where protecting the minority and bipartisanship were clearly important features of the culture.

If the people we elect are doing their best to sort out the conflicting citizen demands for benefits or restrictions based on public policy that is for the most part widely agreed to, this is a system that works fairly well. In the states, no matter who is in charge, solving problems is still the main menu, not legislative love letters to your base. Leadership of a state through its governor and legislature reveal a bias, to be sure, and drawing legislative districts is very much a partisan exercise.  But in the states, lawmakers seem to be much more focused on the good of the order.

In the states, elected officials have to deal with the background picture that is being painted by the president and mainstream media. The pollster Scott Rasmussen and reports this picture, for instance: Rasmussen polls taken at the end of last week reveal that 49% of the 1,000 Americans his team interviewed both think that they pay more than their fair share of taxes (compared to people who pay both more and less than they do) and that rich people still don’t pay enough.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped his budget this week on the public, the media, and the lawmakers who have to fund Ohio’s government.  It outlines (I was going to say “details”, but it’s probably the wrong verb) the finances for the state’s next two years by making a series of policy changes.

In order of explosiveness, the big kahuna is probably the expansion of Medicaid, which the conservatives deplore, believing that the correct approach is to be found in those states which have declared that shoveling more money into a system that is both dysfunctional and the lowest form of health care provision is a bad idea anytime.  I will address this next time, and merely suggest that the political pressure is enormous from hospitals in particular to grab this (for now) 100% federally matched funding for the uncompensated care they contribute.

There are school reforms having to do with funding, which has been a contentious issue for decades in Ohio, based on the Supreme Court guarantee of a “thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state” providing education for all Ohio’s children.  There is a higher education element which allows some higher form of cooperation between our institutions of higher learning in which different campuses lead particular academic specialties.

And there is tax reform.  The more popular features for most folks are a 20% income tax cut over three years, amounting to $1.4 billion, and a 50% cut in small business income taxes up to $75,000.  One of the big negatives is an increase in the severance tax, based on the beginning of a shale oil and gas extraction industry that appears to be coming to Ohio to take advantage of the new development made possible by horizontal drilling.  Many question marks will greet the governor’s plan to tax attorneys, accountants, insurance, computer time and other services much more broadly to pay for the proposed income tax cut.

Something for practically everyone, and new challenges for the same group of people.  States have to balance their budgets, and the lack of agreement on how to use government resources will produce spectacular fights before the dust settles.  But the fights in Columbus are over critical matters and they will be engaged.  There are no unmentioned elephants in the room and not much can kicking or — as I like to say now about the federal government – dragging the anchor.

The only thing I can be fairly sure that will happen in Washington this year is that Saturday mail service will be eliminated, and that because the decision doesn’t get made on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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