OHIO: RESURRECTION

ACT II: OHIO RESURRECTION

What does the future hold? What we make of it. Ohio has all the key components for an economic and technological juggernaut. We’re already entered into many of the industries that will dominate the 21st century including aviation, energy, education, and health care. What we require is a vision of the future that can bind us together and drive us forward. Something to strive for. 

The Dark Horse campaign is all about vision. A vision of an Ohio ascendant. A vision in which we rise from fifty years of economic and political stagnation, a vision in which we grow from our Rust Belt roots (not leave it behind, own the rust belt), a vision of equitable, broadbased, and sustainable growth that benefits our small cities and villages, a vision of Ohioan dominion over the Earth. 

Ohio will lead a world of abundance. By midcentury we will be without hunger, we will be without poverty, we will reach beyond the Earth and into the stars (well, most likely just around the one star for now). We will be a society that guarantees freedom, choice, and opportunity for all its citizens. This is not an unbelievable dream, these are not delusions, these aspirations are achievable. 

The innovations to enable this future are well underway and an inevitability in the medium to long-term. What matters now is how quickly we capitalize on and embrace them. Will Ohio lead this future or will we be dragged along once again, subject to the whims of an unruly and unforgiving world? 

We can be happy. We can be prosperous. We can have hope and opportunity. But we have to choose it. We have to choose to reach for something better. To strive, to be innovators, to learn and to foster our talents. And it is a choice. We have to choose to survive, choose to live, choose to better ourselves, choose to be ourselves. 

This sounds easy and obvious but for decades we’ve chosen the opposite. We’ve been choosing to be Democrats and Republicans. Choosing a political identity over a personal identity. We’ve been choosing partisanship, revenge, and retribution. We’ve chosen hate and vitriol, to revel in the suffering of anyone and everyone we can designate as others, as opponents, as outside our tribe. To deny this is folly, delusion. America has been held back by self-loathing and victimhood. You might be thinking that this is merely self-righteous ravings that don’t apply to the oh so sophisticated and nuanced policy arguments of real politicians but this is honesty. Our decades of decay and suffering are self-inflicted. Stop shooting yourself in the foot Ohio. Stop hating yourself and hating others. Choose to be better. 

A vision should be simple, articulate, and memorable but there is much to be done here and ideas take time to gain traction in our minds as we build the context for them to take root. Imagining a better world is itself a challenge. It demands much of us to even begin to hope, to believe something better is possible. It is the task of OHIO: RESURRECTION to elaborate both the vision for a better Ohio and how the disparate, eclectic fields and policies overlap to facilitate a world that may seem inconceivable today. For now, the key word is abundance. Our future is abundance.

Energy:

Nuclear

  • Retain existing nuclear power plants
  • Expand nuclear engineering programs at public universities
  • Provide funding for advanced nuclear reactor research that use different fuels like thorium and different coolants like molten salt
  • Deploy small modular nuclear reactors

Natural Gas

  • Require safer, more efficient methods of fracking that results in less wastewater. 
  • Require natural gas companies prevent methane gas leaks
  • Invest in developing cheaper methods of natural gas extraction, refining, and shipping. 
  • Begin exploring future uses for natural gas and other fossil fuels within a carbon neutral, sustainable framework

Wind and Solar

  • Expand solar cell production even further
  • Build rooftop solar arrays, no solar farms
  • Expand wind farming in western Ohio
  • Mitigate damage of wind farms
  • Invest in wind turbine improvements to reduce footprint, increase efficiency

Electric Grid

  • Smart grid
  • Incorporate smart grid into broadband expansion
  • Secure the grid
  • Limit disruptions

Battery Storage

  • Develop utility scale battery technologies.
  • Develop Fuel Cells
  • Invest in lithium battery production to help dominate electric vehicle industry

Agriculture

Crop Diversity

  • Popularize more foods
  • Education of preferred farming techniques, different system of crop rotation
  • Develop techniques for farming greater variety of crops
  • Seek out and develop new crops
  • Restore eastern agricultural complex
  • Prepare for a post-corn world

Precision Farming

  • Develop precision farming tools/sensors/software
  • Create program to incorporate precision farming techniques into Ohio farming

Genetic Modification

  • GMOs good
  • Reduce red tape wherever possible
  • Open source GMOs

Industrial Farming and Automation

  • Explore paths for more efficient, more sustainable industrial scale farming
  • Invest in technologies to increase automation of harvesting

Forestry

  • Cross laminated timber products
  • Forestry as carbon sinks
  • Government managed reforesting of disused farmland if the collapse of ethanol proves so damaging to land prices. 

Unconventional Farming Techniques

  • Aquaponics
  • Algae Farming
  • Hydroponics
  • Vertical Farming

Housing and Construction

Public Works/Infrastructure 

  • Modular
  • Better examination of cost/benefit estimations
  • Don’t always settle for lowest bid, examine bids carefully
  • Penalties for contracts that exceed a certain percentage of estimated costs
  • More flood prevention
  • Integration of Ohio’s state infrastructure bank into new Ohio government banking system

Housing

  • Cross laminated timber products for taller wooden structures
  • Modular 
  • Preservation and restoration of existing housing
  • Transition from property tax to land value tax
  • Rezoning to allow denser housing and mixture of residential and commercial 

Healthcare

  • Decouple healthcare from health insurance.
  • Decouple health insurance from employment.
  • Create an interstate healthcare standards compact to simplify operation of healthcare providers across state lines.
  • Explore how Ohio can pursue a Direct Care model while working within the stringent requirements of federal law and the ACA.
  • Transparent pricing
  • Invest in new hospitals, targeting rural Ohio first, through a broad infrastructure program.
  • Reduce exhaustive paperwork, tort reform
  • Expand medical school openings and reduce costs. 
  • Repeal Ohio’s Certificate of Need laws. 
  • Raise awareness of the value and importance of timely vaccination 
  • Greater access to medicine through telemedicine
  • Greater development of remote health monitoring technologies
  • Greater emphasis on both preventative care and general quality of life/health improvement

Education

Post-Secondary

  • Open source textbooks and course materials
  • Open source online education programs created and provided jointly by Ohio’s public universities, community colleges, and high schools
  • More directly linking community colleges and technical schools with local high schools for more seamless transition 
  • Make public universities partially liable for unpaid student loans
  • Eliminate obstacles for students seeking transcripts
  • Expand and modify programs of vital economic importance (nuclear engineering, medical, teaching, aerospace engineering, programming)
  • Consider alternative approaches for assessing student performance beyond basic GPA (weighting courses, for instance)

Primary and Secondary Education

  • Eliminate 12th grade
  • Universal pre-k
  • Support internal diversity and innovation in education by providing multiple styles and paths within schools (this is my compromise with pro and anti-charter school folks)
  • Universal vouchers
  • Centralize funding a little more (maybe with universal vouchers in a horrifying market experiment) 
  • More integration of web enabled and self-paced education
  • Really need to eliminate lead and asbestos in school
  • Good lord, we desperately need to upgrade ventilation and airflow in schools
  • We’re going to teach my version of economics from now on, so Tim decrees! 

Aerospace

  • Space mining
  • Satellites 
  • New propulsion and rocketry

Transportation

  • Never give up on autonomous vehicles
  • Ohio centric high speed rail (acceleration is much more important than max velocity here)
  • Electric vehicle production
  • Build out train connections from Ohio’s small cities to the tri-C route 
  • Why are highways so expensive to build? I blame people
  • Make subways cheap by doing the opposite of whatever NYC does

Communication

  • Rural broadband
  • 5G
  • Domestic competition in internet provision
  • Link with rollout of smartgrid 
  • Enshrine the right of individuals to the data they produce 

Resource Management

  • Space mining
  • Developing techniques for the harvesting of rare earth elements from disused coal mines
  • Natural gas and oil sustainability
  • Conduct a geographical survey and evaluate if there exist mineral resources that can be developed efficiently and cleanly with new technologies.
  • Cleaning up after ourselves
  • Figure out something to do with carbon: nanotubes, graphene, carbon fiber

Innovation and Industrial Policy

  • The importance of standard setting to market dominance
  • The American system forever! Interoperability, modularity
  • Free exchange as crucial to growth
  • Clusters
  • Establish new financial institutions for the state of Ohio
  • Foster a culture of innovation and self-improvement
  • Invest in diverse educational institutions and paths of pure research

Finance

Government

  • Experimental policy 
  • State government as standard setter and centralizer of information
  • Local governments for implementation, tailor local policy to meet state targets
  • Digital government, every interaction with the government should reasonably be done online and in a simplified format. Never stand in line! 

Democratic Reforms

  • Democracy dollars
  • Unicameralism
  • 225 person general assembly
    • Salaries cut to $20,000/yr
    • 6 year terms, 75 up every two years
  • Eliminate self funding (you can contribute as much to your own campaign as anyone else can) 
  • Automatic voter registration
  • Same day voter registration
  • Lower voting age to 17
  • Independent Redistricting
  • Ranked Choice or Approval Voting
  • More transparency from 501c4 or a ban on political spending

Taxation

  • Eliminate the Ohio Commercial Activity Tax
  • Return of the Inheritance tax
  • Sales tax to value added tax
  • Property tax to land value tax
  • Increase taxes on incomes above $150,000 individual a year
  • The Independent Commission on Taxation

Criminal Justice

  • Judicial discretion, eliminate mandatory minimums on a lot of things
  • Decriminalize drugs (and start trying to release drug offenders from prisons)
  • Legalize marijuana and really liberalize that market, none of these state sponsored monopolies
  • No private prisons
  • Increases educational resources and skills training within prisons

Abortion

  • What is broadly viewed as the socially desirable amount of regulation would happen without said regulation and regulation can have hard to mitigate, harmful consequences so the official position of this campaign is that all restrictions on abortion should be repealed from Ohio law.
  • But returning to the status quo that Roe provided is acceptable but not optimal.
  • Abortions can be reduced through:
    • Comprehensive sex education.
    • Access to contraceptives.
    • Financial security.
    • Access to healthcare.