Mark Knows It All

Issue 2 is a referendum on what is popularly known Ohio Senate Bill 5 (SB 5). To RETAIN Senate Bill 5, you vote YES. To RESCIND Senate Bill 5, you vote NO. This has been a hotly contested issue, so let’s take a look at what Senate Bill 5 does. This is the real poop. I report. You decide. (Did I say that?) 1) Issue 2/Senate Bill 5 has nothing to do with balancing the state budget in Ohio.  It has everything to do with local government and state run institutions. It applies only to unionized public employees. It does not cut veteran benefits. It does not cut senior citizen benefits. It does not apply to the 135,000 nurses in Ohio except if they work in a state run hospital. Mostly these nurses work at Ohio State University. There are approximately 2500 of them and their contract already includes most of what is in SB 5 already. 2) Senate Bill 5 first and foremost prohibits Ohio’s unionized public employees from striking. That was the rule in Ohio up until 20 years or so ago, a...

The theme for this week’s Business Week magazine was sports promotion. It tackled everything from winning teams that were “bought” (Steinbrenner’s Yankees to DeBartolo, Jr.’s 49ers) to advertising debacles such as Citigroup buying naming rights for a new stadium as the government was bailing it out…hence the name Bailout Field!! Interesting stuff. But more germane to my life was a series of articles preceding the sports section about IT, or for us mere mortals, Information Technology. The first article dealt with “cloud” computing. That means most computer functions and storage are handled through offsite third party servers. This acts as a money saver for big business because they can buy bare bones hardware that only needs as much power and disc space to allow it to connect to these remote servers where the hard core stuff takes place. More efficiency means more bottom line revenue. Makes sense, I think! Cloud computing is also moving down to “retail” clients like you and me w...

There has been a lot of buzz about Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax reform plan, and rightfully so. Of all the candidates, he has articulated with specificity the problem with taxes in America and why our job situation is so dismal. He has addressed the first pillar of my three pillar plan to bring America back to prosperity: Tax Reform / Energy-EPA Reform / China Trade Reform. So let’s look at what the pizza dude has to say. It is a beautiful thing in its simplicity. He proposes to reduce the corporate tax rate to a flat 9%; a flat personal tax rate of 9%; and a national sales tax of 9%. He has stumbled on the obvious. A tax system in which 47% of working Americans pay no tax while complaining while complaining about the 53% that do is not going to work. Everybody should pay something, even if it is nominal. He also realizes that the corporate tax rate in the United States is the highest in the world at 35%. The norm is 25%. Couple that with all of the regulations, high wages, and EPA crap c...

Don’t get me wrong. Steve Jobs will go down in history as one of the great American inventors along with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. He took what those two American originals gave to us and stretched the telephone and the radio and recording business into directions unimaginable just twenty years ago. In my lifetime I have gone from 78’s to 45’s to 33 1/3rd rpm’s to reel to reel tape recorders to smaller reel to reel tape recorders to eight tracks to cassettes to transistor radios to CD’s to illegal Napster to legal Napster to burning my own CD’s to I-Pods, I-Tunes and MP3’s to my tunes downloaded to my smartphone. That doesn’t even count Apple Computers…the gold standard by which all computers have historically been measured. Although I have never entered the Apple universe, by both accident and design, Steve Jobs walks with me every day when I am on my PC or laptop or net book or pad downloading music. Books and movies are just a click away as my house is now wired ...

Local Democratic elected officials are in a pickle. The Mahoning Valley is obviously a bed of union activism, but not as much as it used to be. Outside of GM and the public employees unions, there isn’t a whole lot going on. As the area shifts to being a center of natural gas and oil production, the question arises as to when the area will actually shift Republican. Forbes Magazine mentioned the wealth that will be pouring into Eastern Ohio over the next ten years, but it is from a product which is not only frowned upon by today’s Democratic Party, it is downright demonized. The stated intent of Barack Obama and Democrats like him is to put the fossil fuel business out of business. An article in the Youngstown Vindicator unintentionally demonstrated the dilemma facing local Democrats. Jason Wilson, son of former Congressman Charlie Wilson, currently represents the Ohio 30th Senate District in Columbus. But he has been redistricted out as a result of Ohio’s loss of population. Unlike ...