Mayor from Ohio. (Getty image file photo.)
Each morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio, the country and the world that catches our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye and have published it here.
Sign up for our free daily newsletter to get all the Ohio news you need to know delivered straight to your inbox every weekday morning.
If you already subscribe, please share the Ohio Capital Journal with your family and friends: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/subscribe/
Catching our eyes
• Rural schools. Cole Behrens of the Columbus Dispatch reports: “Rural schools in Ohio are facing budget crises as districts try to cut costs“
(Rural) districts across the state say they are hurting by rising costs, property tax reform and a lack of state aid that they say is undermining their ability to offer the education that often underpins their communities…
In May, The Dispatch reported that more than 120 public school districts in Ohio were projecting negative cash balances by 2029, the worst rate since the Great Recession. Across the state, districts from the largest urban schools to the smallest rural schools are struggling with budget constraints leading to cuts in jobs and services.
• Cryptocurrencies. Dave Miller of TiffinOhio.net reports: “Trump cryptocurrency founders bankrolled Ramaswamy as he pushes for Ohio public funds to be invested in Bitcoin“
In the seven weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy won the Republican Party’s primary for governor in Ohio, his campaign raised the legal maximum donation – $16,615 apiece – from a compact circle of people with one thing in common: They built a cryptocurrency company that brought in more than a billion dollars for President Donald Trump’s family…
Donations land at the exact intersection of money and politics. Ramaswamy has said he wants to be “the strongest pro-Bitcoin governor in the country,” has personally owned Bitcoin and Ethereum, and co-founded a company that bet about $1 billion of its corporate treasury on Bitcoin. The crypto industry’s most politically connected operators – some of them under federal control in Washington – wrote him maximum checks as he blocked his nomination to lead a state he promised to transform into a haven for their industry.
• Health care unaffordable for most Americans. ABC News reports: “Less than half of Americans say they can afford health care: Gallup“
Fewer than 49% of Americans can afford health care, according to Gallup data released Thursday, the lowest rate since tracking began in 2021.
The data shows that within one year, approximately 2.8 million people were no longer considered “cost secure,” meaning they could no longer afford to access high-quality care or pay for visits and prescriptions. Americans’ concerns about future health care costs, including visits and prescriptions, have also reached an all-time high of more than 40%, according to Gallup.
• A nation in decline. The New Republic reports: “Trump’s disturbing mental breakdown signals the decline of a nation“
Economist Paul Krugman discusses all the ways Trump is making our country worse – and what it means that we tolerate his deepening megalomania and desecration of our republic…
Sargent: Actually. You had this video where you gave a very broader perspective, assessing where we really are now. I will try to briefly summarize your argument. Fundamentally, the point is that the United States is no longer viewed by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation. Our military can’t do what we thought it could – it can’t force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding or Trump’s bidding. That because of Trump’s tariff fiasco, we have less influence on trade wars than we thought. That China is having unexpected impacts on supply chains and significant goods and significant resources. That, in part, because of our abandonment of Ukraine, our erstwhile allies are looking past us to a post-American world. And so on. Is this the basic argument?
Krugman: This is the basic argument. Even things that I find somewhat encouraging, like the fact that Ukraine is hanging on even though Trump has completely cut them off – the US just stopped sending money and basically stopped the flow of weapons, we won’t even let the Europeans buy weapons for Ukraine – and yet Ukraine seems to be gaining the upper hand, which shows they don’t need us. The world doesn’t need us.
This is also part of what happened in Iran. It turns out that if there was one thing we thought America really had, it was the world’s greatest army and the world’s best weapons, and no one else could do it without us. And it turns out that we were completely helpless in the face of Iranian drones and that Ukraine can cope without American weapons.
So who are we? We become witnesses of world events. America is a rogue power that does crazy things, it can’t even impose its will on a third-rate military power like Iran, and we don’t seem to actually be needed to defend Europe. We are a kind of shadow of ourselves on the world stage.
Sargent: Do you think this is an inexorable decline? Can it be reversed?
Krugman: Some of them are probably irreversible, and some of them would have happened anyway. To a vast extent, America as it looked when Trump took office was an obsolete vision. We didn’t quite understand it. But in much of the world, there was still a reflexive tendency to think: you have to adapt, you have to give in, let the American president intimidate you no matter what. The truth is that the fundamentals have already changed compared to the United States in the global power game.
But there are many things that have obviously been made worse by Trump’s blunders. The world must now suspect, even after Trump disappears from the scene, who will be next? How do we know we won’t have another Trump-type figure? Does an agreement with America mean anything when we have just seen an American president tear up every agreement we had? Does America’s threat mean anything because we just saw the same guy completely fail? After all, this guy was – melancholy to say – elected fairly by the American people. What does this say about America?
We won’t get it back. America’s reputation took generations to build. You won’t get it back unless you give us three generations of good governance from now on.
