Fixing Ohio's Economy? It's a crapshoot.

They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. In Ohio, it's increasingly looking like economics makes dysfunctional marriages.

Gov. Ted Strickland (yep, that one...the Methodist minister) is standing behind a plan to place slot machines at all Ohio horse racing venues as a way to generate revenue for our increasingly crippled economy. According to the Administration, that proposal would likely generate at least $900M, and help pay for things like, say, library funding in our great state.

So, we all get to have a little fun playing the ponies and dropping quarters in the slots, and folks have access to books and jobs and roads. Everyone wins...right?

The problem here is that this is an incredibly risky political choice for a man who holds his ministerial credentials in high regard, and who has openly campaigned against the latest proposal to bring full-scale casino gambling to the Buckeye State. Already, Senate Republicans are taking advantage of the opening, creating a "task force" to examine the "viability" of Strickland's proposal. Sen. President Bill Harris (he of the wicked buzz cut) is already playing the move for political points, saying he won't approve of any gambling plan that doesn't come before Ohio's voters first.

The disconnect here isn't tough to grasp. One the one hand, we have a $3.2B hole in the state budget to plug. On the other, we have the repeated votes of Ohioans to kibosh prior gambling plans, concerns about the regressive nature of gambling as a tax revenue generator, and the Governor's own history of opposing gambling proposals.

It's a pickle.

Despite this blogger's prior lambasting of gambling proposals as precisely the wrong kind of revenue for reviving a crippled economy, we have to remember that we're living in desperate times. Whether it's fair or not, ultimately the responsibility for steering the ship of state falls on Gov. Strickland's shoulders. In this economic storm, there are hardly enough buckets to bail water fast enough, and anything and everything that will help Ohio stay afloat until we can get this thing fixed has to be considered. California is going to start issuing IOUs for its debts, and a great many other states are struggling to keep their collective heads above water. For now, the Governor's decision, though tough, is the right one. Do what you've gotta do to stay afloat, and deal with the fallout later.

For better or worse, Strickland is now inextricably married to the gambling plan. For his sake (and ours), lets just hope that in addition to this quick fix he can identify what put us in this position in the first place, and come up with an economic recovery plan that sets us on the path to long-term economic stability.

For all the crowing Bill Harris and the Senate Republicans are doing right now about gambling, rolling the dice on a long-term plan for recovery (in addition to the slot machine band-aid) might just give them more crow to eat than even they can stomach.