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Tag: Rob Moore

What would “mass deportations” do to Ohio’s economy?

COMMENTARY

by Rob Moore Ohio Capital Journal

The dust has settled on the 2024 presidential election and we now know that Donald Trump will once again be President of the United States.

Trump has promised many things for his second term in office: deregulation, tax cuts, an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine, tariffs on all goods from other countries. The step he could take that could have the most immediate impact on both human rights and Ohio’s economy, however, would be on immigration.

Trump has promised to conduct mass deportations of unauthorized migrants, rounding up immigrants in workplaces, schools, homes, and places of worship to send them back to their countries of origin. Local law enforcement will be a key player in determining how “mass deportations” will be carried out in the state of Ohio.

Municipal police departments, county sheriffs offices, and the state highway patrol will have to decide how much to defer their work from policing violent crimes and property crimes to carry out federal immigration policy. What decisions local law enforcement make around prioritization could have a significant impact on Ohio’s economy.

Earlier this week, Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Marty Schladen wrote about the important role immigrants play in Ohio’s economy. Immigrants in Ohio are taxpayers, consumers, business owners, doctors, software developers, professors, cooks, health care workers, and college students.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

An analysis done by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and Niskanen Center released before the election shines some light on what the new administration’s immigration policy could do to immigration. Trump’s immigration plan is estimated to reduce both authorized and unauthorized immigration, increase removals from the interior, increase adjudication of current cases leading to more removals, and encourage others to leave on their own.

These researchers estimate this would mean as many as 740,000 fewer immigrants in the United States in the first year of Trump’s presidency. Weighted for Ohio’s foreign-born population as reported in the American Community Survey, that could mean as many as 9,700 fewer immigrants in Ohio in about a year.

The AEI/Brookings/Niskanen study reports this massive reduction in the number of immigrants in the United States would cost the country 0.1 to 0.4 percentage points in GDP in 2025. In Ohio, weighted for Ohio’s foreign-born population, that would mean somewhere between $330 million and $1.3 billion in lost gross state product.

For comparison, the Ohio Department of Development estimates 21 counties in Ohio have a gross domestic product of $1.3 billion or less. So if these policies are carried out as planned, Ohio could lose a small county’s worth of its economy in fewer consumers, business owners, and workers. On a per capita basis, this means a cost of $28 to $110 per person in the state. So you can consider this a head tax of $28 to $110 per person to pay for having fewer immigrants living in this state.

Just because something shrinks the economy doesn’t mean it is bad. We might decide it appropriate to institute policies that trade off economic growth for reductions in poverty and inequality, improvements in environmental quality, or more time for people to spend with their children or elderly parents. But what exactly are we buying for this immigration crackdown? After all the national conversation on this topic, I still don’t have an answer to this question.

YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

___________

Rob Moore

Rob Moore is the principal for Scioto Analysis, a public policy analysis firm based in Columbus. Moore has worked as an analyst in the public and nonprofit sectors and has analyzed diverse issue areas such as economic development, environment, education, and public health. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Denison University.

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Nov 21, 2024
[Commentary] Suicide is on the rise in Ohio

(Photo by Quentin Young/Colorado Newsline.)

by Rob Moore – Ohio Capital Journal

This article is about suicide. If you or someone you know needs support now, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

Five Ohioans die of suicide every day.

This is just one of the many data points released in a new publication released last week by the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. This data snapshot focuses on the prevalence of suicide in Ohio and how incidence has changed over time.

Below are some of the top findings from the release.

Suicide is a leading cause of death for working-age Ohioans.

Over 1,400 Ohioans died from suicide in 2022, the most recent year we have data for. This makes suicide the fifth-leading causes of death for working-age Ohioans, behind unintentional injuries like drug overdose and motor vehicle crashes, cancer, heart disease, and COVID-19.

Ohio’s suicide death rate is 15 deaths per 100,000 people, just slightly above than the national rate of 14.5 deaths per 100,000 people.

Suicide victims are disproportionately white, male, working-age, and Appalachian.

In 2022, 17 white Ohioans died from suicide per 100,000 population, higher than the rate of 12 for Black Ohioans, 10 for Hispanic Ohioans, and 7 for Asian Ohioans. Men were also four times likely to die from suicide than women. This is despite the fact that women attempt suicide at a rate 70% higher than men.

Suicide rates were highest in 2022 for working-age adults, higher than the rate for young adults, retirement-age adults, and children. Suicide was most common in Appalachian counties, with 15 of Ohio’s 22 counties with the highest suicide rates located in Appalachia.

Suicide is on the rise–for nearly everyone.

Since 2007, suicide rates have increased for men and women, white, Black, and Hispanic Ohioans, and Ohioans in every age group. The only major demographic group that has seen a flat suicide trend are non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander Ohioans.

Risk factors for high school students are also becoming more common.

Compared to 2019, female Ohio high school students were more likely in 2021 to feel sad or hopeless, seriously consider suicide, make a plan to commit suicide, or attempt suicide. While more male high-school felt sad or hopeless and seriously considered suicide over that time period, fewer made a plan or attempted suicide. The increase in suicide plans and attempts among female students was much larger than the decrease among male students.

The increase in suicide rate is driven by firearms.

Suicide deaths involving a firearm increased 60% from 2007 to 2022. This accounted for 75% of the total increase in suicides over that time period. The remainder of the increase was driven mostly by an increase in deaths by suffocation and other causes. Deaths by poisoning decreased over that time period.

Suicide is a hard social problem to make progress against. That being said, the Health Policy Institute of Ohio suggests interventions to improve mental health to prevent suicide attempts.

A 2016 evidence review published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded legislation reducing firearm ownership lowers firearm suicide rates. It also acknowledged, however, that court interpretations of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution have made most legislative options for reducing firearm ownership politically unfeasible in the United States.

The researchers however, say targeted initiatives like gun violence restraining orders, smart gun technology, and gun safety education may be able to reduce risk for current gun owners. These sorts of approaches do not have a strong evidence base yet, but they at least give us something to tackle this difficult problem.

If you or someone you know needs support now, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

ROB MOORE

Rob Moore is the principal for Scioto Analysis, a public policy analysis firm based in Columbus. Moore has worked as an analyst in the public and nonprofit sectors and has analyzed diverse issue areas such as economic development, environment, education, and public health. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Denison University.

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Feb 16, 2024
Ohio Senate budget attacks poor people on food assistance, affordable housing, and other programs

COMMENTARY

by Rob Moore – Ohio Capital Journal

The Ohio Senate Republican budget passed last week put forth a new vision for social safety net spending in Ohio.

The proposal suggests reduced spending on food banks, housing for pregnant women, affordable housing, and school meals for poor children. It also proposes making it harder for low-income people to get access to Medicaid, SNAP (formerly known as “food stamps”), and other public benefits.

These changes to the budget are used to fund income and commercial activity tax cuts.

When Senate President Matt Huffman was asked about this range of cuts to social services, his explanation was that he is trying to “stimulate” a conversation about sustainability of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families fund. He expressed worry that the fund would be insolvent in five years if spending and revenue continues at current levels for years into the future.

So let’s talk about it.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (often shortened to “TANF”) is a relatively small program that mainly provides income to very poor Ohioans. It is the successor to the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. This was the program that had gained the dreaded label of “welfare” in the early 90s.

Many politicians did not like AFDC because it gave cash to low-income families. It became a massive dog whistle punching bag for the Reagan administration, who was able to vilify it to such effect that it was ultimately the Clinton administration that finished the program, following up on a campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.”

And he did. The new TANF program was a block grant given out to states to not only provide cash assistance, but also to pilot a range of different programs focused on getting people to work.

Early on, this change was seen as a success. Poverty abated and employment, especially among single mothers, increased. But this was the 90s–a period of economic expansion.

The subsequent recession of the early 00s followed by the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 exposed how these changes to the social safety net had made it less resilient and kicked out many of the supports previously in place to hold struggling families up.

While new programs from the 90s like the earned income tax credit are a good tool for supporting families who have work, they fail when structural problems make work unavailable on a massive scale.

All this is to say Huffman has a little bit of a point here. Block granting TANF took one of the most straightforward and effective income support programs in U.S. history and capped it, limiting its potential effectiveness greatly. Now the dollars available for supporting low-income families need to come from somewhere else.

Is the answer to this problem to cut social spending left and right and use that as a tool to fund income tax cuts and cuts to commercial activity? Probably not. If the plan put forth in the Senate is adopted, it will represent a massive transfer of income from the most needy Ohioans to those with the most resources already. Seems like a big cost to try to make a point.

ROB MOORE

Rob Moore is the principal for Scioto Analysis, a public policy analysis firm based in Columbus. Moore has worked as an analyst in the public and nonprofit sectors and has analyzed diverse issue areas such as economic development, environment, education, and public health. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Denison University.

MORE FROM AUTHOR

Jun 19, 2023
Four ways to help people with disabilities get work

ROB MOORE – Ohio Capital Journal

A bill currently in the Ohio General Assembly would eliminate the subminimum wage for people with disabilities.

Currently, companies in Ohio are allowed to apply for a waiver from the state minimum wage to hire people with disabilities. The goal of this program is to make it easier for companies to hire people with disabilities and therefore to give more people with disabilities jobs.

I was talking to Michael Hartnett, a policy analyst I work with at Scioto Analysis about this problem earlier today. He brought up a few options for the state to increase employment of people with disabilities without paying them less.

Job training

Providing more funding for job training programs for people with disabilities can help give people with disabilities skills that are valuable for employers. The federal Employment and Training Administration provides funds for training people with disabilities.

The state of Ohio even has an office called the Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation. The Bureau specifically focused on providing individuals with disabilities the services and support necessary to help them attain and maintain employment. More funding for training programs referred through the Bureau could increase employment of people with disabilities.

Grants for making workplaces accessible

One reason it is hard to hire people with disabilities is because employers may have trouble accommodating workers with disabilities in traditional workplaces. For instance, if a job traditionally requires typing, people with limited dexterity would typically not be a candidate. A grant for a job that requires some typing could allow a company to hire a scribe part- or full-time to type for that person.

One example of this type of program is the Retaining Employment and Talent after Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) Initiative, a federal program that Ohio takes part in. Eight state teams received competitive awards to develop and run pilot programs aimed at helping workers stay at or return to the workforce following an illness or injury. A similar program could be developed for counties and cities if this program is successful.

Subsidizing wages for people with disabilities

The Earned Income Tax Credit is a popular wage subsidy aimed at bringing low-wage people into the labor force. A weakness of the Earned Income Tax Credit is that it is targeted at families, so people without children often have a small credit. Having a larger credit for people with disabilities or making the state earned income tax credit refundable for people with disabilities are two policy levers policymakers have for making it easier for people with disabilities to go to work.

Mandates for accommodation

A final option is to just tell employers they need to accommodate. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to reasonably accommodate workers with disabilities. Strengthening state law around accommodations could require employers in Ohio to work harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

A 2018 study estimated that making it easier for people with disabilities to work would bring 10.7 million people into the U.S. workforce and would increase national GDP by $25 billion. If this is the case, that means more people with disabilities in Ohio’s workforce would mean hundreds of thousands of new workers and hundreds of millions of more dollars in the state economy. This looks like a win for everyone.

Dec 19, 2022
What if anti-abortion activists really wanted to reduce abortion rates?

Birth control pills. Getty Images.

Countries with more restrictions on abortion do not have lower rates of abortion

A Guest Column by Rob Moore

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision to strike down the right to family privacy around abortion care has cleared the way for Ohio’s six-week ban on legal abortion.

Since about 1 in 3 women do not realize they are pregnant until six weeks or later, this bill effectively bans legal abortion care for a large number of pregnant women.

Ohio lawmakers are not stopping there, either. Boldly saying that pregnancies resulting from rape and incest should be required by the government to be carried to term, legislative leaders are pushing to ban legal abortion care in its entirety.

This approach may come off as extreme in the face of its tepid support among the general public. According to the Pew Research Center, more Ohioans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases than those who think that it should be illegal in all or most cases. One in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime and most do not believe the extreme ontological claims about moral standing pushed by legislative leaders.

A tragedy of legislative leaders’ efforts on abortion is how ineffective they will be at achieving their own goals. A 2017 cross-country analysis of abortion restrictions found that countries with more restrictions on the practice of abortion do not have lower rates of abortion. Believe it or not, interference with the private medical decisions of citizens is not only frowned upon in liberal democracies and beyond, it is also extremely difficult to do.

Perplexing is legislative leaders’ ignorance of the decline of abortion over the past few decades. According to both the Guttmacher Institute and the CDC, the number of abortions in the United States have declined from a peak of about a million and a half in 1990 to less than a million in 2020.

So what can legislative leaders do if they want to actually reduce abortion? There is one tool that has led to the reduction of abortion over the past decades that legislators could use that also do not infringe on personal medical decisions. That is improvement of access to contraceptives.

Washington University of St. Louis researchers found that providing access to no-cost contraceptives cuts abortion rates by 62% to 78% among those who receive the contraceptives. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute have found reductions in abortions are driven particularly by increase of use of long-acting reversible contraceptives such as intrauterine devices (IUDs), which have high success rates in reducing pregnancies and give women the ability to control when they want to become pregnant.

A high-profile Colorado program providing long-acting reversal contraceptives to low-income women reduced teen births and abortions by 50% according to the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment. In my graduate studies I worked with a team to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on a national version of this program, finding such a program would have benefits that would far outweigh its costs.

Abortion is not going away. Even families that plan well find themselves in tragic situations where a fetus is unviable or the mother will die. Police state intervention is unlikely to be tolerated by families or effective in reducing abortion rates. But anti-abortion activists can reduce abortions if they want to: by increasing access to contraceptives that give families control over their reproductive health.

Jul 17, 2022
Commentary by Rob Moore: Making it harder to be a substitute teacher might not do what you think

COMMENTARY

by Rob Moore

On Monday, Representatives Adam Bird and Don Jones introduced Ohio House Bill 583, legislation to tighten regulations on educator licensing for substitute teachers. The bill increases the educational threshold for substitute teachers from a more broad requirement of a “post-secondary” degree to a more specific “bachelor’s” degree while creating some exceptions to this rule.

The exceptions the bill puts forth are mainly age-related: allowing people with associate’s degrees and at least 21 years since birth to be a long-term substitute teacher, allowing people who served in the military and who have elapsed 21 years since birth to be a long-term substitute teacher, allowing people with sufficient bachelor’s degree coursework and who have spent 21 years on earth to be a substitute teacher. The bill also allows people who have spent five years as an educational assistant to be a long-term substitute.

The bill also authorizes the state board of education to create rules for issuing educator licenses for people who do not hold bachelor’s degrees that can be used for a year.

While the section that allows the state board of education to set rules for temporary licenses could result in a loosening of licensing requirements, overall the bill represents a tightening of licensing requirements for substitute teachers. Rather than just requiring a post-secondary degree, which could include associate’s or other non-bachelor’s degrees, the new bill raises the requirement for substitute teacher licensure to those who hold bachelor’s degrees then carves out specific exceptions for people without bachelor’s degrees.

Increasing requirements for substitute licensure could have a few different impacts. The central goal is likely to improve quality of education provided by substitute teachers. Presumably, someone with a bachelor’s degree can provide better quality education than someone without one, with obvious exceptions, for example people without bachelor’s degrees who are trained in education compared to people with bachelor’s degrees in other fields.

Unfortunately, little evidence exists to confirm to us that degree attainment will lead to better teachers. While there is limited evidence that having a math or science degree may help with math or science teaching, degree attainment overall has not been definitively linked to better outcomes for students. If we can’t find this evidence for teachers, we should be even more dubious about a supposed connection between degree attainment and student outcomes for substitute teachers.

On top of this, the bill will likely have labor market impacts for educators. Tightening requirements for substitute teachers will decrease the supply of qualified substitute teachers, which will drive up the wage needed to attract them as schools vie for a shrinking pool of substitutes. This effect could be stronger than it would be for teachers since substitutes are often actively considering competing offers from different schools, thus making their options more competitive than teachers.

On top of this, making it harder to hire substitutes could create perverse incentives for schools. If substitute teachers are more scarce or expensive, it could cause administrators to limit the ability of teachers to take sick days or otherwise take time off.

While raising the bar for substitute teachers makes intuitive sense, interventions like this need to be based on evidence, and the evidence of the impact of degree attainment on substitute teachers is basically nonexistent. We can hope that if substitute teachers are required to have higher educational attainment than before, that we would at least build in funds to assess the intervention after it is implemented.

Mar 9, 2022