Editorial

Tax policy experts and lawmakers have long circled 2025 as a year to prepare for. What makes it so significant?

For one thing, Federal COVID money to states is expiring, straining state budgets at the same time the economy is starting to weaken. For another, Republicans in Congress are working to increase and extend President Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — while cutting trillions from health care, housing, and education programs for everyone else. And it all up and you get a fiscal tsunami.

While major tax policy changes are being made and discussed in Congress, this is also happening in the states.

Bizarrely, we now seem to have a standoff between the Trump administration and the US Supreme Court and lower federal courts. As wildly, it’s over a situation where the administration admits that they made a mistake, but still seems to be trying to draw a crazy line in the sand and not make it right. What’s building up as a constitutional crisis is all about the deportation of one man, Abrego Garcia, who was deported based on the administration’s unprovable claim that he was a member of a gang. Nonetheless, they sent him to a prison in El Salvador, and, so far, are continuing to refuse to return him despite the US Supreme Court decision that they need to do so.

The backstory on Garcia seems straightforward. He’s been in the Maryland for the last dozen years. He’s married and working in construction. They are raising three children with disabilities. He has never been arrested in the US, and there is no record of illegal activity here or abroad. Yet, somehow, he ended up on the night flight to the notorious prisons in El Salvador.

The current situation in Afghanistan is undeniably linked to the 1990-1991 Gulf War. This earlier conflict could have been prevented if then President George H.W. Bush had told Saddam Hussein that Iraq would be blasted back into the stone age if the Butcher of Baghdad even considered invading Kuwait before it happened. Saddam definitely would have backed down if he had been threatened with retaliation before he made that disastrous decision. But the first Bush administration misjudged him and mismanaged the situation to allow a minor crisis to grow into a major one. Even though the president had been a former director of the C.I.A., he was clueless or pretended to be clueless when dealing with this situation. Maybe he thought that involving the United States in a war would make him more popular than using diplomacy to prevent one. His approval ratings did hit an all-time high just after the war before the collective failure of his foreign and domestic policies led to his defeat in a landslide in 1992.

Mayor Ginther's and Columbus City Council's decades long continuation of granting tax abatements to wealthy developers and corporations have robbed hundreds of millions of dollars from our Columbus Public School coffers, let alone contributing to escalating property taxes that are forcing senior homeowners into foreclosure or having to unnecessarily sell their homes to unscrupulous investors. Columbus City Council will be voting tonight on two Enterprise Zone 10-year 75 percent tax abatements totaling $5.125 million.   

With the upcoming Republican Party's state budget cuts in public education dollars a certainty, how in good conscience can a Democrat-controlled City Council located in the state’s largest public school district give away $5.1 million in property tax abatements in exchange for one company’s 15 $20-an-hour jobs and the other company’s 12 $24-an-hour jobs? These jobs will result in a meager $2,550 per month of City income tax revenue, or $30,600 annually, versus a property tax giveaway of $510,029 annually. 

President Donald Trump has said “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” He claims tariffs will restore American trade supremacy, bring lost jobs back to the United States, and most bizarrely, replace income taxes.

Tariffs can be a useful tool to regulate global trade in the interest of jobs, wages, labor rights, the environment, and consumers — if applied correctly.

Atomic Energy’s death spiral has spawned a run to green power.  

But the toxic mineral lithium has become a critical pitfall…with clear ways around it that demand attention. 

 Humankind’s 400+ licensed large commercial reactors embody history’s most expensive technological failure.

Once hyped as “too cheap to meter,” just three “Peaceful Atom” plants have opened in the US since 1996, all of them very late and hugely over budget.  Four at Japan’s Fukushima blew up in 2011, with ever-escalating economic, ecological and biological costs.  Two in South Carolina are outright $9 billion failures.  Projects in Georgia (US), Finland, France and the UK have come with catastrophic delays, overruns and cancellations.  So have much-hyped Small Modular Reactors, and the taxpayer-funded idea of restarting nukes already dead.  

And in the post DeepSeek era, gargantuan projected power demands for Artificial Intelligence and crypto are coming back to Earth.  

After Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced his intention to help break a potential filibuster of the Republican spending bill, America’s fascist president, Donald Trump, took to Truth Social to praise his old friend: “Congratulations to Chuck Schumer for doing the right thing,” he wrote. “This could lead to something big for the USA, a whole new direction and beginning.”

Schumer’s stance justifiably angered the Democratic base, as it gave away all leverage the anti-fascist coalition has for the foreseeable future to stop Trump’s illegal power grab. The minority leader defended himself from progressive criticism, saying he had the overwhelming support of his caucus, which I actually don’t doubt, despite the fact only nine other Democratic senators voted with him.

I’m no expert in Senate procedure, but it’s my understanding any member of the body could have denied the bill unanimous consent, forcing a debate which would give the opposition time to mobilize against the legislation. No Democratic-aligned senator did that, including various liberal darlings. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion this was all carefully-coordinated political theater.

Although the nations of the world have pledged to respect a system of international law and global responsibility, the recent behavior of several countries provides a sharp challenge to this arrangement.

For over three years, the Russian government has conducted a brutal military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine―the largest and most devastating military operation in Europe since World War II. Defying Russia’s international obligations―including a peace treaty it signed with Ukraine, a ruling by the International Court of Justice demanding Russia halt its military operations in Ukraine, the UN Charter, and repeated UN General Assembly condemnations of Russian behavior by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations―the Putin regime has stubbornly persisted with Russia’s imperialist aggression against its smaller, weaker neighbor.

Sixty-two years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., ignited America with his dream of what this country could be. Regrettably, that dream turned into a nightmare when Walter Carter, Jr., the president of the Ohio State University, declared that OSU would “sunset the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI)” as well as the Center for Belonging and Social Change (CBSC), effective February 28. So the sun is going down on diversity and inclusion at OSU? Is OSU now a “sundown town?”

For those of you too young to remember such places, they were towns that made it clear that Black people were not welcome there “after sundown,” often displaying these hostile sentiments on large billboards on the way into and out of town. Who is welcome here, and who is now excluded from the OSU community? What ideas and thoughts are welcome here, and which are excluded? Carter could not have made it more clear by leaping to obey legislation that has not even been enacted yet and federal executive orders that do not carry the weight of law.