Doesn't the Dems' supply-side conversion seem suspicious?

The budget debate continues in Columbus, with only a few legislators brave enough to advocate a tax increase in order to soften the draconian cuts to social and health-care services in the budget.

The reason, of course, is that nearly everybody, including our supposedly progressive governor, is afraid the voters will hand them their heads at the polls if they support a tax hike.

And the depressing thing? They're probably right.

While the governor and vast majority of legislators deserve every ounce of criticism coming their way for failing the weakest and most powerless of Ohio citizens, the main culprits are the majority of Ohioans who would vote against them if they did so. There's no getting around it - most of us are too selfish or cheap to help our neighbors who are less fortunate, or to maintain vital community services such as libraries and parks.

Sounds harsh but how else does one interpret a position that places a higher priority on keeping more money for ourselves than helping people who have less resources and/or more problems than we do?

Just as it was the reality when Ronald Reagan pushed supply-side economics in the 1980s, most advocates of this theory nowadays have a built-in conflict of interest. They stand to benefit financially from what they're pushing. Thus, they can pay lower taxes without feeling guilty about shortchanging poor people, since in the long run, everybody benefits, right? If you've got money, it's the win-win theory!

These days in Columbus, the same calculus is working among the usual-suspect Republicans. However, for no-tax-increase Strickland and the majority of Democratic legislators, the "œworried about stalling the recession" argument just camouflages their real motivation - not wanting to give the other side a free ride to election victory in 2010.

Notwithstanding the basic inhumanity of their economic approach, at least the Republicans are being consistent. That's not something the Democrats can say. They're appropriating the GOP's economic mantra, and in so doing, abandoning all their supporters who have nowhere else to go.

Finally, before miscasting my argument as a weepy defense of the welfare state, please have a talk with a welfare caseworker, or a drug-addiction counselor, or a home-health nurse, or a mental-health clinician - or better yet, some of the law-enforcement, health-care and other public-sector workers who will now have to clean up all the battered bodies falling through Ohio's disintegrated social safety net. They will tell you in heart-breakingly concrete terms what this will mean for thousands of Ohioans.