Saturday stats: Build a better budget
Posted May 25, 2019 in eNews
Budget Bites by the numbers:
As the Senate gets ready to pass its version of the state budget, catch up with what Ohio needs and what we got in the House budget proposal.
$675 million: In a welcome move, the House allocated $675 million to wraparound services for K-12 students struggling with trauma from poverty, mental health issues or addiction. Mental health and addiction treatment are big priorities in both Governor DeWine’s budget and the House version.
$10 million: The Ohio Association of Foodbanks serves one out of every six Ohioans and needs an additional $10 million annually to meet growing demand for food assistance. Spoiler alert: that’s not what they got.
$2.04: Ohio spends $2.04 per person (using state and local revenues) on domestic violence programs. The national average is $5.82 per person. The House budget proposal increases support by $1.5 million a year– a good start – but not enough to meet the need.
18.1%: That’s how much Ohio’s support for public higher education fell between 2008 and 2018. That means more expensive tuition, placing college further out of reach for middle- and low-income students.
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8: Our summer interns are starting soon! We’re eagerly awaiting the arrival of eight bright young minds from Kent State, Tufts University, the Ohio State University, Smith, Princeton, Oberlin and the University of Akron. You’ll get to know them better in future newsletters.
56%: That’s the share of the poorest fifth of Ohioans that would benefit if lawmakers passed a refundable Earned Income Tax Credit worth 10 percent of the federal EITC. The house budget plan took important steps to clean up Ohio’s tax code by shrinking the LLC loophole, but Zach Schiller and Wendy Patton say they could do a lot more to help Ohio families who need it most.
$226.1 million: That’s how much could be redirected from Ohio’s bloated prison system if the new criminal justice reform bill, SB 3, includes the 5 Rs: reclassify, retroactively apply it, reform, reduce and reemploy, according to a report by Piet van Lier.
$0: The amount of state need-based aid students at Ohio’s community colleges and regional branch campuses get, Victoria Jackson shows. A flawed formula used to calculate the Ohio College Opportunity Grant locks these students out of state support. The formula also penalizes students at Ohio’s only public Historically Black College & University, Central State. Meanwhile, it incentivizes students to attend more expensive for-profit colleges that don’t lead to better jobs and often leave students saddled with debt.
$35.5 million: Columbus will lose $35.5 million through a tax abatement awarded to software company, CoverMyMeds for simply moving its headquarters from one neighborhood to another. Hannah Halbert says the CoverMyMeds deal will deprive Columbus schools of needed revenue. Cities should be guided by transparency, accountability and equity when crafting economic development policy – instead of competing against each other in a race to the bottom.
1,400: That’s how many jobs Ohio added last month — slow-going compared to the nation which added more than 263,000 jobs. In this month’s JobWatch, Hannah explains that over the last 12 months, Ohio’s job growth rate was a full percentage point lower than the nation’s.