Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute, issued a statement upon Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signing House Bill 128, which repeals the ill-advised taxpayer-funded nuclear bailout included in House Bill 6 from the 133rd General Assembly, saying, “With the stroke of a pen, a substantial part of Ohio’s two-year-long April Fools’ Joke on taxpayers has finally come to an end.”
In a new piece, The Buckeye Institute looks at language tucked inside Senate Bill 94, that “should concern public interest groups on both sides of the proverbial aisle.” Jay R. Carson writes, “Senate Bill 94’s disclosure mandate is the wrong answer in search of a problem. If a court believes that the funding source of a case is relevant to the litigation at bar, the court can always order the identity disclosed. But if such disclosure is so irrelevant to the case that the court sees no reason to order it, then Senate Bill 94’s mandate serves no purpose.”
The Buckeye Institute released Policy Solutions for More Innovation: Build a Regulatory Sandbox for Financial Technology Innovators, which calls for Ohio to construct a regulatory sandbox, which would cut red tape that often keeps innovative technology from reaching users. “While Ohio is currently home to many national banks and financial institutions, it risks losing these employers to other states that are already creating environments where these companies can develop and deploy new products and services.”
In a new piece, The Buckeye Institute looks at how Ohio lawmakers can improve higher education funding to better prepare Ohio’s future workforce. Greg R. Lawson writes, “Deliberations over Ohio’s biennial operating budget are well underway, and the higher education portion of the budget remains one of the largest areas of spending. Unfortunately, taxpayer dollars are not being used as effectively as they should, and lawmakers need to build upon their past efforts and more appropriately align higher education spending to better prepare Ohio’s future workforce.”
Rea S. Hederman Jr., executive director of the Economic Research Center at The Buckeye Institute and vice president of policy, commented on newly released employment data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, saying, “As Ohio enters the second year of the pandemic, the state’s slow but steady recovery continues with unemployment falling to 5 percent in February 2021, only 0.3 points higher than it was in February of 2020.”
Greg R. Lawson, research fellow at The Buckeye Institute, issued a statement upon the passage of House Bill 128, which repeals the taxpayer-funded nuclear bailout included in House Bill 6 from the 133rd General Assembly, saying, “As The Buckeye Institute has said since the introduction of House Bill 6, this type of corporate welfare is bad policy and lawmakers should further act to end other taxpayer-funded subsidies—be they for coal, natural gas, or renewables.”
Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute, submitted written testimony to the Ohio House Government Oversight Committee on the policies in House Bill 149, which would disclose party identification on general election ballots in Ohio’s judicial races. In his testimony, Alt noted that including party identification would catalyze higher levels of voter engagement in general elections for Ohio’s judges and would clear up confusion in this opaque system that causes fewer Ohioans to cast votes in judicial races.
Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute, issued a statement upon the Ohio General Assembly’s override of Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of Ohio Senate Bill 22, saying, “The use of extraordinary emergency powers must be subject to democratic checks and balances, and Buckeye applauds Ohio’s General Assembly for enforcing this check while still allowing Ohio to respond to genuine emergencies.”
The Buckeye Institute submitted written testimony to the Ohio Senate Government Oversight and Reform Committee on the policies in House Bill 6, which would allow pharmacists to test for COVID-19 and administer COVID-19 vaccines—a recommendation that Buckeye made in the early days of the pandemic.
Robert Alt, president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute, testified before the Ohio Senate Local Government and Elections Committee on the policies in Senate Bill 80, which would allow party identification on general election ballots in Ohio’s judicial races. In his testimony, Alt urged lawmakers to correct Ohio’s “flawed policy that reduces voter engagement in judicial elections” and “requires judicial candidates to identify by party, and then denies voters that very same information.”;
