The Ricochet Podcast - NRI Ideas Summit: Governor John Kasich

Episode Date: May 3, 2015

In this conversation with Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Ohio Governor John Kasich made it very clear he wants to run for president on Friday, repeatedly alluding to the prospect as he promoted his brand of unconventional, “compassionate” Republican politics. Source

Okay, it sounds like we are ready to go. So, thank you all for being here. Governor, great to see you again. Thank you, nice to be here. This is the great governor of the state of Ohio. Let me start, let's just get right into this. So, one of the big political things that's happened over the last five or six or seven years is that we have this crop of Midwestern Republican governors, yourself and in my home state of Illinois where we've got Bruce Rauner and Mike Pence in Indiana and Michigan and Pennsylvania. And it appears to me as I look at the evidence that there's a Midwest comeback in this country that, you know, we used to consider states like Ohio the kind of rust belt of America. Flyover.

Flyover country. So tell me what's going on in Ohio. I mean, and is this something do you, are you bullish on not just your state, but the whole region of the Midwest and what's happening? Yeah, I don't know enough about all the other states, but as far as Ohio, you know, it's interesting. I was in

Washington. I was the budget committee chairman when we balanced the budget, and when we did that, I was the chief architect of the, one of the chief architects of that. One of the things we did is we cut the capital gains rate in 1997 because we thought it would lead to growth. Right. And so we got to a balanced budget. We were running a –

So we went, what, 28 to 20 percent, right, on capital gains? Yes. And so we went – I left – I thought we had a $5 trillion surplus, and I left, and I went out to business. And being in business, you know, it was like going from the classroom actually to the laboratory. And so I learned a lot of things in business. And then I ran for governor. And we were, when I got in, we were, it was like the worst situation in Ohio history, $8 billion in the hole, which was almost 20% of our general revenue fund. What year were you?

This would have been in 2011 when I inherited. We had lost 350,000 private sector jobs. Our credit was hanging in the balance, and we were so structurally out of balance. The folks on Wall Street that did the credit rating said, there's no way you can get this back. I said, no, we can. So I took a lot of the tools of the things I learned, both in Washington, which is you don't pay attention to whoever yells the loudest.

Just go do your job. Skinny down the government. You know, make it more efficient, more effective, bring innovation, the things that I learned in the private sector. And the way I looked at it is if you have a restaurant and you have no customers, you can't raise prices. You've got to cut prices and you've got to change the menu and downsize your business. So we've cut taxes by $3 billion, the largest in America of anybody.

In compassion. We killed the – it's all passed. It's all in law. Yep. We killed the death tax in Ohio. We've done a lot to help small businesses, and we've brought down the marginal rates. And today we are not only – not $8 billion in the hole, we're $2 billion in the black, big surplus.

We are now up almost 340,000 jobs. Our credit is rock solid, and our budget is structurally balanced. And the other interesting thing, Steve, is we're also diversifying Ohio. So you think about us as a Rust Belt manufacturing, and we love manufacturing. It's sort of like that old Crosby, you know, manufacturing. And we love manufacturing. It's sort of like that old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, love the ones you're with. We love the ones we're with, but we want more friends. So we're diversifying Ohio now, and we've got, you know, a billion-dollar investment from a big company in cloud computing.

I mentioned to Steve that we just have a company from Thailand that's thinking about building a cracker in our state. They're going to spend a lot of money. Cracker facility is what's used to build plastics. We have a big energy industry now in Ohio. We also have medical devices, financial services. We're the second largest financial services of Chase Bank. And so what we're seeing is a diversification of Ohio. So we not only have industry, and with industry we want advanced manufacturing, innovation in that,

but at the same time between logistics, financial services, the energy industry, medicine, all these things, Ohio is beginning to look much different. And now we've got a charge on. And now what I'm trying to do is to continue to lower the taxes that punish investment and risk-taking, which is our income tax. So you want to get rid of the income tax, right? Yeah, ultimately I do, but we're going to need some tax reform, which means that those things, some things should go up while we bring the income tax down. Now some of the income tax is coming down to be about a half a billion because we've restrained spending. But it's not going to be enough to make a big difference. And I want to move from a penalty on investment and risk-taking to an incentive for people to come in by lowering the income tax.

The other thing we're doing is we're also cutting taxes at the bottom, like what Reagan did. It's an accordion. Lower the top. Provide incentives for those who are working to continue to work harder and longer and smarter. So, you know, I'm bullish where we are, and I think the diversification helps. And we're, of course, invested in job training for jobs that really exist. I privatized economic development in

Ohio. I didn't want bureaucrats doing it. And so now we have smart people that actually know the difference between a stock and a bond, talking to Jamie Dimon. So, with privatization, workforce training, improving education, competency-based education, the range of sweeping innovation and change brought about by the team of people that I have has been pretty serious.

So let me ask you about the energy revolution that's going on. Does the Marcella Shale goes into Ohio? Utica. Okay. Yeah. So you're pro-fracking, you're pro-drilling? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I know some people have said, well, you want to tax the industry.

So explain your energy strategy. Well, first of all, when the issue of fracking first came up, somebody said, well, you're going to have a lot of protesters. I said, but you're going to have counter-protesters. Those are going to be the kids who are living in mom's attic who wants their son to get a job, and this industry might help. Well, when you deplete the value of our state, then you ought to pay for the depletion of our value, which is the severance tax. Our severance tax is 20 cents on a barrel of oil. It ought to be raised up, and we're using that money to lower the income tax. So, you know, nothing should be raised if other things can't be lowered. And so we'll see.

It's a lot of special interests that fight tax reform, just like here in Washington. I mean, the reason we don't have tax reform here, the reason we can't lower the corporate rate, is because special interests and friends of politicians block change. It doesn't matter to me who gives me money. I mean, we're going to do what we have to do because I'm hired as a CEO to fix problems.

And after my first year in office, my approval rate was 28%. I mean, you have to work to have that bad of an approval rating. But then I was reelected with almost 64% of the vote. I had 26% of the African-American vote, 51% of union households, 60% of women. And I won Cuyahoga County, which the president won by 40 points, and I won it. So the people are feeling better about Ohio, but there's another element to this, Steve, and that is when we've had economic growth, we've been able to reach out to people who live in the shadows to give them a chance to be able to rise, get on their feet, become independent, and enter the workforce and have a better tomorrow.

So Barack Obama is running around the country talking about, quote, middle-class economics, which is kind of funny because the middle class has gotten pretty creamed under his policies. What is John Kasich's or should the Republican Party's middle-class economics agenda be? Well, look, everything about this issue of the divisions between the rich and the poor, most of it has to do with education and skills. So we're providing skills in many different ways. First of all, we put in a third grade reading guarantee so you don't have social promotion in our schools. We also are investing in some early childhood. We think that's important. But we're holding teachers

accountable by developing an evaluation system. We're bringing vocational education down to the seventh grade. We've also, through metrics, been able to determine the most in-demand jobs. So we're trying to direct our young people to thinking about what their God-given passions are and how they can get something that's connected to it. We want more students to be out of the agrarian model where you sit in a class and everybody learns the same way. I want more real work experience to kind of get people excited about education. In the two-year and the four-year schools, we're driving the same amount of information

so that when your son, daughter, niece, nephew, whatever, goes to school, they're not just walking in the door and walking in circles. We're saying, what do you want to be? How do you get there? What does it take? And those skills, and we want lifetime learning. Somebody's got to be constantly being educated

because as we upgrade the skills, the worker becomes more valuable. You want the government to do that? Well, what we're trying to do, Steve, is, I mean, I think workforce training is important. I'd rather not have it in Washington. I mean, these are one of these programs that ought to be swept out of this town. Let me be involved in workforce training. Let me decide, you know, the way it works now in Washington, you have to be unemployed basically before they help you. It's like 80-20, you know, the amount of money you can spend. You have to spend 80 percent of job trading money on the unemployed.

It may not even be 20 percent on the employed. So here's only Washington would say, okay, you've got to really be hurting before we help you instead of training you so you don't lose your job. So I think that workforce dollars like welfare dollars, like education dollars, frankly ought to be swept out of this city. They ought to be put in the hands of governors and local communities to try to deal with the unique problems that each state has. Let me throw an idea by you and just get your reaction. Let's say we had a Republican president in 2017,

and let's say the idea was we were going to create five big block grants. Transportation, job training, education. I wouldn't even have a block grant. Whatever. I'd change all that. But here's the deal. Tell me if you'd take this. So let's say we did have that system.

And we said, okay, John Kasich, you know, in Ohio, we're going to give you 80 cents on the dollar we're giving you now. 80 cents. But we're going to let you spend the money on how much you want. Would you take it? Probably. But look, when you're a governor, you don't do theory. You don't say

I'm going to build a bridge, but it's only going to get halfway done. But it is very appealing to me. But Steve, remember, when I was Budget Committee Chairman, I was getting rid of departments. So this is not anything new. My bona fides in terms of how you restructure this city, let me just tell you this. This city is broken. We all know this. This is not,

you know, some campaign pitch. This is what I've been doing most of my adult life. I would like to ship Medicaid in a block grant back to me. Let me manage my program. Welfare, which by the way, we chase dad out of the home because if dad makes any income, the family loses everything. What a stupid policy. We need to reform all of that. The whole welfare system, which I was involved with, as you recall, when I was here, we need to get to 2.0 welfare and hold people accountable, but get them trained and get them trained for jobs that exist. We're involved in that in Ohio as well. But when it comes to job training, when it comes to education, the highway program,

send two or three cents here to maintain the interstate and get rid of the rest of it because all you do is tax yourself, send your money to Washington, they scrape it off the top and send less back. So why don't we just keep our money with all these rules and regulations and we do well. So I'm going to give you a good example. We were able to issue bonds against our Turnpike revenue. Our Turnpike is like an independent country in Ohio. They were applying for U.N. membership.

And so I issued debt. I mean, my team issued debt against the tolls from the Turnpike, and we were able to claim a billion dollars in extra infrastructure spending. We have the largest infrastructure spending program in Ohio history. And we're going to be able to go back to the market and probably access it again. So by us being able to do creative and imaginative things, we're in a position of where we can do our infrastructure. Everybody in the country is struggling with infrastructure.

We ultimately will once this all runs out. But right now, we're robust, and we're doing terrific in terms of fixing the infrastructure in Ohio, which is critical, because we're within 600 miles of 60% of the country. You have to move things, and that's what we're doing. So I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate, I sure do, because I worked with you back then, but this is the man who probably is singly most responsible for the only four balanced budgets we've had in, what, 50, 60 years. So first of all, congratulations for that. I think this guy deserves a round of applause, right?

I mean, it was the case of budget. So my question is this. Now we find ourselves in another half-trillion-dollar hole. And year after year, and the projections are it's going to go back up to a trillion. Can we rebalance this federal budget? Well, first of all, I saw that they're doing the old Washington deal. Now they're going to cut it. We're going to give up the chocolate cake next year,

but this year we're going to have two pieces. I mean, that's the way they work here. Spend all the money now and promise something later. Look, a big part of this problem, in my opinion, is special interests come in. They play the Washington Monument strategy that you can't change me. Our problem has been a couple-fold. One, you have to have leaders that are not going to pay attention to focus groups, who yells the loudest, and special interests when you want to fix a company

or fix a state or fix a country. Every single thing in this government or the federal government should be reviewed. You know, it used to be years ago that if you wanted to go to the White House, you'd have to get a pass. Now you just jump over the fence. And that kind of illustrates the fact that so this federal government should be doing some basic things, and the rest of the things need to be moved out of here. And we can figure out a way to do these block grants

and be able to transform this town into what it can do and the states in terms of what we need to do and fashion state and local decisions that are unique to us. Now, Steve, we need to bring, you know, in my state, for example, Medicaid, when I came in, Medicaid was growing at 9%. My first budget, it grew at 3%, and we took no one off the rolls and didn't cut one single benefit. Innovation. See, what people have to understand, I mean, I know that people understand this, but if you look at the great companies, the Googles, the PayPals, all these companies, they are driven by innovation. Why does Apple have this new watch out? It's always innovation.

It's always something new. It's a new product. It's energy. It's new thinking. And in government, if you can create that atmosphere, and that atmosphere is created by building a team that says go for it. You can innovate your way to all kinds of significant things. Like I said, we privatized economic development. I just told you about the infrastructure changes we made.

When I wanted to do this with the turnpike, people wrote stories saying that John Kasich's political career was over because they said this is too hard to do. This should have been done 30 years ago. There's so many things that people have been risk adverse to doing because they're worried about getting reelected or making somebody else happy. If that's your goal, become a salesperson. Don't run for public office. And that's been our problem.

So you've got to look at problems and take them on. You can't duck them. I mean, as a governor, you have to look at a problem and you have to try to figure out how to fix it. And it doesn't always mean slash and burn. It could mean that you can give a customer a better experience by thinking smarter, by being more creative. And that's what we try to do in the state. That's how we've gone from $8 billion in the hole to $2 billion in the black. We have a big debate going on right now in Washington that probably takes you back. I didn't finish it. The answer is, yes, we

can balance this budget. I'm for a balanced budget amendment because, you know, presidents come and presidents go and the debt keeps rising. We need a back-up. You want a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. You need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and then you've got to have some people that have guts. So we're having, speaking of balancing the budget, there's a big debate within the Republican Party.

It goes back 20 years from the time you were the budget chairman about a program called the Export-Import Bank. Oh, I'd get rid of it. Do we need that program? No, I'd get rid of it. I mean, I went after all kinds of programs like that. Because corporate welfare, I mean, look, let me flesh this out a little bit. I mean, Republicans are viewed by Americans as the party of corporate welfare. If we could get rid of programs like this, and in many cases, Democrats who support these programs just as much as Republicans.

Steve. Should this be a priority? Don't you remember that I created the Corporate Welfare Tax Reform Caucus? I said if we're going to reform welfare for poor people, we ought to reform welfare for rich people. I got invited by the business roundtable to make a speech because I had all these ideas about things like Import-Export Bank,

the Agency for International Development, and I told them, I said, you know, if I wasn't proposing this corporate welfare reform, I'd be serving the dinner, not speaking at the dinner. So, no, I think that we have, if you, I'm not an expert on the import-export bank, but I read some things today on the way here about these goofy loans. We face it in the States as well.

Whenever you're using somebody else's money, it's really easy not to be very diligent. But when you think – but I think about taxpayer money like it's my money. Our whole team does. We all think, do we need this program? Why do we have it? Does it work? If it doesn't work, we're going to get rid of it. We're going to get rid of it.

So, okay, put on your body armor because I'm going to ask you a tough question. Yeah, ask me whatever you want. One of the controversial things that you've done that conservatives do not like was the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. And I wonder if you can explain to the folks here why you did it. Well, first of all, I'm for getting rid of Obamacare because it's a top-down plan. The last person who expanded Medicaid who was a Republican happened to be Ronald Reagan. Now, what I've done is I got a chance to bring Ohio money back to Ohio

to solve some of our most vexing problems. And I just had a lady up here telling me about her son who's had his fifth episode in a psychiatric hospital. What are we doing with this money we're bringing back that's Ohio money? Well, first of all, we're putting it in our local communities to treat the mentally ill. We have 10,000 people in my state in prison who are mentally ill. We have more mentally ill people in state penitentiaries than we have in psychiatric hospitals. Now, all you do is put them in there, 22,500 a year, and then they come out, and then you do something else, and they're back in. That is not acceptable, and it's immoral on top of everything else. Who else are we treating? The drug addicted. We are now in the prisons taking drug treatment

into the prisons and handing these people off to local treatment facilities rather than having somebody who's a drug addict getting out of the prison and seeing the drug pusher on the corner, which is what happens. It's a revolving door. You go to prison, you get out, you go in, you go out at 22,500 a year and think about the loss of human capital. Let's talk about the working poor. They spend their time in the emergency room. They go in, they're sicker, they're more expensive. We all pay because they have no insurance. So if I can get them health care and keep them healthier, then I can reduce the pressure on emergency rooms, which the trends indicate is happening. So there's two issues here.

One, it's cost savings, number one, ultimately. Number two, there is a moral issue here about we're all made in the image of the Lord, and we have to help people get on their feet. Now, that doesn't mean you – my mother used to say, Johnny, it's a sin not to help people who need help. It's equally a sin to continue to help people who need to learn how to help themselves. And so we're reforming our whole welfare system to take the toughest cases and to connect them with the training and real jobs outside of the welfare office so they can get on their feet. That's a conservative position. Let people realize their God-given purpose. So some states don't want to take it. You know, that's up to them. But in my state, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the working poor are in a better place. Combine that with

welfare and their ability to get on their feet. To me, it's a very smart investment. And you know, part of the conservative movement are people of faith. And I just happen to think that when we realize that everyone is made in the image of the Lord, we all have a responsibility to try to help people get up. We know some won't work at it, but you know what? We're going to impose. We've got personal responsibility connected to any of this. So we have a big Supreme Court decision coming down sometime soon on this issue. Who knows how it's going to roll?

But let's assume for a minute that the courts strike down this part of Obamacare, which would essentially – King Burwell, yeah, the Steve. So – Yeah, we don't have a state exchange. We didn't do it. Okay. Well, if that happened –

How do we fix it? Yeah. How would you fix it? Well, we may have some real leverage to bring about some significant change, and I've got my folks who took that Medicaid from 9 to 3 percent working on what we can possibly do. So I don't want to get forward with the case, but I can tell you that it isn't going to be some simple little sloppy answer here. We're going to look at the most innovative way that we can reform this Medicaid program. But let me also tell you, in Ohio, we're pushing

something that I think can be a national program, and that's called payment reform. And let me explain this very quickly. One of our children's hospitals went into research to figure out how to keep kids out of the hospital if they have asthma. There are fewer hospital visits. The hospital gets less revenue. The insurance company gets more revenue because they don't have to pay claims. They're sharing the benefit. The hospital gets some of the savings. The insurance company gets some of the savings. You see it's a win-win. We now have the private sector hospital and insurance providers working together. This is actually a health care solution, working together to say we can keep people healthy. We can get them in a situation where their care can be managed, not by the government, but by the private sector.

We're just conveners. And if you work on keeping people healthy and you have transparency, you reduce the cost of unnecessary tests. You start approaching health care in a way that people can be – we can incentivize the system. The market will work. Just let the market work. And so payment reform, pay attention to it, please, because I think it is actually an answer to Obamacare. We don't need to have top-down. We need to have creative solutions in our states.

And so we're excited about what we're doing in that area. So I have two or three questions here from the audience already asking you about your position on Common Core. I have no idea what your position is on Common Core. I know it's a hot-button issue. I'm going to talk about my state. In my state, we have high standards. The standards have a curriculum attached to them. You have high standards how you're going to educate kids. The curriculum is developed by local school boards with parental advisor groups. I support that. I don't

want to have lower standards, and I don't want it run out of Washington. Do you want federal standards? Pardon? Do you want federal standards? No. Well, I think we to have lower standards, and I don't want it run out of Washington. Do you want federal standards? Pardon? Do you want federal standards? No. Well, I think we can have federal goals, but, you know, what happened with this whole thing about standards where the governor said, look, a kid in Arkansas ought to get the same education as a kid in Illinois and a kid in Ohio. And so the governor's put together a program to say we need to have higher standards. I like that better than anybody here. People here want to say we ought to have higher standards. I like that better than anybody here. People here want to say we ought to have high standards.

That doesn't bother me. But this whole thing is the governors themselves put together a program to say this should be run by the states. And that's exactly what we've done. I think what troubles people about this, because the first part of what you said, I couldn't agree with more. I mean, states should have very high standards. But I think I speak for a lot of people here. We don't want the federal government

adopting, you know, why should the governor of, you know, Ohio have anything to say about what the standards are? I don't want it either. And if I felt that this whole business was somehow connected to this town, I wouldn't be for it because I favor local control. But what I'm saying to you is the governors themselves wrote the standards. We've implemented the standards. I didn't implement them. Obama didn't implement them. Nobody did. The local school boards have adopted the standards, and now the curriculum is being written by local school boards. I mean, I don't know what's wrong with that. I've talked to governors who were involved in this who now have run away from it. I said, if there's something here I don't understand, if there's some nefarious scheme, tell me what it is.

Because I don't want Washington trying to tell my local schools. I don't even want to tell my local schools what to do. But I am pleased in Ohio that we have high standards and that we're in a position of where those local school boards develop the curriculum to meet the high standards. And I think kids ought to be tested. I have two 15-year-old daughters. I want to know how they're doing. But I'm not interested in anybody in this town. I'm not even wanting to do it at the state level.

Let local communities do this for rental control. Do you have school choice in Ohio? Yeah, of course we do. We have vouchers. Yeah, we have vouchers. We have a lot of charter schools. Where? In Cleveland?

All over. Well, we have the Catholic schools in Cleveland, but vouchers. But we've created a new voucher program for kids in the very earliest grades. How's that working? A little early to find. How do I? School choice is great. I've been a school choice advocate from when I was young and in Congress.

I mean, I believe in school choice because competition is good. We have changed the Cleveland schools. This is where I worked with the Democrat mayor, African American, the whole community, and we basically put somebody in charge of the schools now. And it's been an incredible amount of reform in the Cleveland public schools, and you have to have good schools. And I think choice helps it, and we engage in it. And, you know, it's working pretty well.

I also brought Teach for America in, which hadn't been in Ohio. Now we've got Teach for America in Ohio. So we have to break the agrarian model of education and let kids be able to get out and see things in the real world. We've got to make sure that our local schools are controlled by our parents and our local school boards. We have to make sure that we are getting them educated, which is why I did institute a third grade reading guarantee, because there was too much social promotion going on. And if a kid gets to the seventh, eighth, ninth grade and they can't read, it's over.

So that's the way I look at it, Steve. None of this federal stuff, they're not, you know, it's just not what I want. It doesn't make sense. So we obviously all watched what happened in Baltimore this week. And I just want to ask you about there's this kind of black rage in a lot of these cities. And maybe it's not just due to, you know no jobs, no education opportunities, the unsafe areas. It seems to me for Republicans this is an opportunity to go into these cities and say, look, we have solutions for it.

I wonder if you agree with that. I received 26 percent of the African-American vote, and there are very few people that ask me, well, how did that happen? It happened not because we were just talking about things. We were doing things. Right. So, you know, reforming the Cleveland public schools was a big deal to African-Americans in Cleveland. Just two days ago, I announced a task force series of recommendations on police and community with two fundamental things right

up front, a statewide policy on the use of deadly force and also a regimen for hiring and recruiting minorities into the police department. The reason why I was able to get that percentage of the vote is because I've been involved in the school reform. We have a set-aside program in Ohio where white folks get 85 percent of the contracts, and with a goal of 15 percent for minorities for the first time in Ohio history, we're going to attain that. We are building a major highway in Cleveland. It's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We've set aside 20 percent for minority firms to get into the business of contracting construction because I believe in entrepreneurship for everybody.

We've reformed. We hear about the reform of the criminal justice system. We've done that, significant things in reforming the criminal justice system. And so what's happened is by doing all those things and giving people a sense that everyone has a stake. Everyone can be lifted. Everyone can have potential. No one's being left behind. That's the message that we've sent in Ohio.

So this group came back. I appointed about a 20-plus member group. My chairman is the former head of the highway patrol and my current head of public safety, and the co-chairperson is a Democrat African-American woman who ran for Secretary of State, who is, I think, the Vice Chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. She was on this with my fellow there with law enforcement, with legislators, with citizens, and with ministers, including the black minister, Catholic minister from Youngstown. They came up with a consensus, a unanimous recommendation of additional things we can do to integrate law enforcement in the community, to make sure that there is transparency,

data collection, lots of different things. So we worry about the ability to connect with people, some of whom are just frustrated. And the other thing that I tell you is it's got to be jobs, too. And that's why the three things I'm most focused on in Ohio are jobs, jobs, and jobs, and making sure that our young people have a chance. We have a mentoring program now. I'm going to tell you this because you may all like this one. I went to Cincinnati, and their graduation rate in a Cincinnati public school is about 63%.

There's an insurance company in GE, Western and Southern Insurance in GE. They go into this school. They mentor kids for one year. The graduation rate in this high school, made up largely of minorities, is 97%. So we have a program now in Ohio to encourage mentoring in all of our schools across the state. Because here's what happened, folks. When you have somebody that comes and mentors you, who tells you about a better way of life, when they tell a 16-year-old girl, kids shouldn't be having kids, when you say there's a better life ahead of you, that the

Lord has a purpose for your life, that you like my clothes, you like my car, it can all be yours, but there are some things you have to do to be able to get there. When you do that, you begin to inspire people to see the world in a different way. And that's about community. See, one of the problems with growing a big government is that people kind of feel like, well, somebody else will do it. We are not going to solve the basic problems we have in this country with drugs and crime and poverty and all these things without all of us, all of us, like Marvin Olasky used to talk about, all of us in the trenches in one way or another to change lives and give hope.

And the evidence is there. We just need to do it. So if you were someday president of the United States, What are the three things that you think would be most important that you could do at the federal level in a hurry to get this economy? We got this lousy GDP report. Yeah, it's terrible. 0.2%. So the economy just isn't growing as it should be. So what can we do to supercharge growth?

First of all, you need to have certainty. We need to. We've got to fix this corporate tax rate. We've got to get into tax reform and get the tax code flatter. I'm talking to Steve Forbes about his flat tax. Either pick that or go with the current system. I'm going to look at the distribution tables on that. The regulations are just out of control.

We have a program in Ohio called CSI, not the television show, but the Common Sense Initiative. And we review all onerous rules and regulations show, but the Common Sense Initiative. And we review all onerous rules and regulations systematically, and we repeal them. We need a CSI at the federal level. Okay, in addition to that, the rules that we have passed on our lending institutions are extreme. You know, if you don't have capital, you don't have growth. Capital is the lifeblood of making an economy grow, and we've strangled capital because we've strangled, with all these federal rules and regulations, some of our lending institutions that can't do what they need to do. We need to start moving to a balanced budget.

I would become the strongest advocate of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, but I wouldn't wait just for that. We'd start doing exactly what I did when I was here as budget committee chairman. And, by the way, I just didn't get to chairman one day. I spent 10 years of my life learning all this. Bring a team of people in here. Maybe open the little Hoover Commission where you get business people to come in and sit next to careers. And I think we begin systematically shifting with a block grant process a lot of programs out of this town.

This is all aggressive, but I tell you, it can happen. Nobody would have believed back when I first offered my first budget, the vote was 405 to 30. I had the 30 to put a budget plan in order that the day would come soon after that, 10 years after that, where we would actually have a balanced budget the first time since we walked on the moon, paid down the largest amount of modern debt, cut taxes. No one would have believed it. Things are possible with people who understand how to move the system, understand how to work with people in both

parties, which is not happening today in this country, to be able to get into a position to ignore the people that are the special interest to try to get you to cut a little special deal for them. These things are achievable. Tax reform, balancing budgets, deregulation, remove the uncertainty of what's going to happen to our small businesses with things like Obamacare. I have no doubt that the best is ahead of us, but I want to tell you, you put somebody in this office that plays games, that nibbles around the edges, forget it.

Forget it. We'll be back here. You'll be back here. I won't Forget it. We'll be back here. You'll be back here. I won't be, but you'll be back here saying, what went wrong? Why can't we fix this? It's doable, folks. It's doable with the right leadership, and not just one person, but leadership that spreads throughout all the levels of the government. We've seen it happen before, and it can happen again. again. Last question because we're just running out of time. It's almost impossible to think that Republicans could win the presidency without winning Ohio.

They can't. We know that. Ohio is the key state. Ohio probably and Florida. Can Republicans win Ohio? Obviously it would help if you were on the ticket, but even if you weren't, what do Republicans have to sort of stand for? How do the Republicans win the great state of Ohio, the Buckeye State? There is a view that there's Republican voters and Democrat voters. Guess what there are?

There's American voters. And we all have the same anxieties. What are they? If I have a job, can I keep it? If I have a job, can I keep it? If I have a job, can I make more? If I lose my job, can I be trained to do something that's going to help me to be successful in my family? Is my son and daughter going to be able to go to college, and am I going to have to mortgage the house to pay for it?

And by the way, when my son and daughter graduates, can they get work? What about the drug problem? Can we be drug-free? Can we control our neighborhoods? Can we restore some of that culture that we understood in the past that set personal responsibility, teamwork, empathy, faith, family? These are the values that need to be reasserted. And it takes all of us to do it. And the notion that no one's left out. No anger. No finger pointing.

No downer. It's about hope. And it's not false hope. It's real hope. It's a fact that every single person born, every little baby in the arms of a mom, that mom looks at that baby and anything is possible. Black, white, rich, poor, I don't care. That's the America that I grew up with. My father carried mail on his back.

He used to say, Johnny, what are you doing here in this politics business? And I'm now governor of Ohio. And people are writing about whether I may be president. That's America. That's what we need to renew. And if that message gets to people in Ohio, we'll win. But if it's a divided, divisive, polarizing, ideologically pure message, you forget it. It's not going to happen. I've got to ask you one more question before I let you go.

So some people, including myself, say, you know, John Kasich is just too combative. He's just too, you know, you're just too rough on the edges. You know, I've known you for a long time, and you say it like it is. You know, stylistically, some people think, you know, you're too testy. Let's think about that for a second, okay? He's very direct. I come from Pittsburgh. We're all direct.

Okay. Folks, think about this. We're up two days after the election to figure out who wins Ohio. Now, if I'm too rough around the edges, how do I win almost 64% of the vote? How do I beat an incumbent governor to get elected? No, you know, I think people are tired of Namby Pamby. I think people do want direct, but they want compassion. They want to believe that, you know, they want personal responsibility. They want accountability. So, you know, I'm direct, but you know what?

I care about people. I want people to feel like they matter. And I'm going to be direct about that too. So at the end of the day, sometimes people remember me back when I was a very young congressman, you know, here in Washington and all that stuff. You know, people grow. If they don't grow, it's kind of sad. I've had an opportunity to grow. My faith is strong. And the only reason why I'm doing this is I love America. And I believe that America can recover all of its greatness. I stood with Ronald Reagan in 1982.

I was the only Republican to defeat an incumbent Democrat in the country. When Reagan was in 1982, Republicans wouldn't appear with Ronald Reagan, which was fantastic because I got to spend a lot of time with him. So think about that. Think about that opportunity. Think about hope. Think about the ability to make tough decisions, Steve. And by the way, in all the people thinking about this, I spent 18 years on the Armed Services Committee. I have national security experience on top of all of this.

So we'll see. We'll see. But I appreciate being here. The great governor of Ohio, John Keefe. Thank you. Bye-bye.