The game of economic chicken continues unabated in Washington with the latest episode, “The Sequester.” This was a plan so scary, so economically hideous, that only a pack of idiots would let it come to pass. It was dreamed up during our summer economic crisis du jour in 2011, to ensure that the involved parties would have to bargain in good faith lest terrible things that were harmful to the well-being of the economic recovery and the country at large be unleashed.

Never underestimate the ability of the idiots who pass for our legislators to do the wrong thing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they failed to do the right thing. They pulled off an incredible display of fingerpointing while sitting on their thumbs doing nothing.

The original deal, passed with overwhelming Republican support with some Blue Dog Dems, is now being blamed on President Barack Obama by the GOP. Paul Ryan, the voice of all things economic for the GOP, gave one of his usual blame Obama speeches, completely ignoring statements he’d given crowing about how “we” got this passed into law. John Boehner tried to show how the GOP’s two bills from the last Congress’ session were being completely ignored, so don’t blame them for not trying to address the situation.

You’d think that someone who has been in Congress as long as Boehner has would know that all legislation dies with the end of the session, and if you want to vote on it, it has to be introduced as new legislation in the current session. Either he has no idea how his job as Speaker of the House works, or he’s trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Neither choice bodes well for our hopes for effective government.

The only plan, if you can call it that, is the Holy Grail of no new taxes on the rich. Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, things are about to get more difficult for us everyday folks. The consensus is that the sequester will cost at least 700,000 jobs in an already weak job market, and will shave at least half a point off of this year’s economic growth. Oh yeah, and if you get a flat tire tomorrow, it’s Obama’s fault. Wall Street is reaching new heights of profitability and CEO compensation is at an all-time high. If you own a gun shop, you’re doing very well. Other than that, things are about to get sluggish.

During his State of the Union address, Obama said, “The greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next.” The GOP has made it an art form to totally obstruct anything that Obama has tried to do since Day One of his first term. They met the night of the first election and decided to totally oppose everything Obama, the will of the people be damned. They’ve even gone so far as to filibuster their own bill to block anything Obama tries to do to address any of the problems facing the nation.

Instead of offering plans to address things like mass unemployment, growing inequality, health care, foreclosures and increasing poverty, they’d rather manufacture crisis after crisis. This isn’t governance, it is spite. They come out and tell you what the American people want in their minds, completely ignoring the will of the voters. Instead of trying to woo voters with fresh ideas, they’d rather try to rig the system to get their way.

The facts are there, but they refuse to acknowledge them. Taxes are lower than at any time in the past 60 years. Fact: The deficit under Obama has gone down every year since 2009, more in the last 3 years than at any time since World War II, and is trending downward for future years. Fact: Spending under Obama is the lowest under any president since Eisenhower. Fact: Entitlements like Social Security don’t add a dime to the deficit. In fact, one of the largest creditors of our national debt, larger even than China or Japan, is the Social Security fund, which Congress has “borrowed” from for years. If you paid that back, we’d be solvent until 2060. Fact.

The sequester could be repealed tomorrow. Many of the problems that we face are manufactured for political gains instead of for the good of the entire country, and our nation has enough on its plate without adding to the problems. What we need are statesmen and stateswomen, not politicians. Think what we could do if we tried to work for the common good.

Email Don Burnard at [email protected].

In October 2011, Gov. John Kasich signed into law Ohio House Bill 153, which broke the monopoly daily publications held on legal notices purchased with public money.

I have covered this ground before, but in light of recent events, it bears repeating. The bill eliminated the limitation that links charging for newspapers with being permitted to publish legal notices. It opened the legal publication business to any newspaper of general circulation that publishes at least once a week and meets other criteria, all of which Toledo Free Press satisfies. The bill also requires a participating newspaper to offer its best classified rate for such publications. Allowing newspapers such as Toledo Free Press to publish these notices is intended to ensure that the best rate offered by any participant in this market will be competitive. The result should be substantial savings for all who are required to publish legal notices.

Toledo Free Press has, predictably, had to fight to get local government to learn and respect the new law. A number of agencies have begun taking advantage of our lower rates to reach Lucas County taxpayers. Late last year, Toledo Free Press began the process with Lucas County Auditor Anita Lopez to compete for delinquent property ads. Eventually, Lopez sought an opinion from the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office, which, on Oct. 16, ruled, “[Toledo] Free Press would now qualify as a paper of general circulation.”

Shortly after that, Lopez opened bids for the delinquent property ads.

Lopez cited Toledo Free Press’ lower circulation in areas such as Neopolis and Curtice as reasons for awarding the legal ads to The Blade. That perceived shortcoming has been addressed.

But after the Village of Ottawa Hills published legal notices in the Feb. 10 Toledo Free Press, a Blade representative contacted village administrators claiming, “The Toledo Free Press does not qualify as a Newspaper of General Circulation as specified by Ohio Revised Code.”

This is not true, as evidenced by the opinion of the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office. Competition is fine; inaccuracies and distortions are unethical and improper.

Too many Lucas County officials are stuck in old models and counterproductive ways of thinking. There is a new reality, and while many fear and resent the changes, those changes are happening in many counties and will continue to chip away at reckless spending of taxpayer money.

Toledo Free Press will continue to compete for county and municipal legal ads, in what will undoubtedly be a long educational process.

Gov. Kasich amended this law because of the tough economic situation that municipalities face today. He recognized that it was not in the townships’ or residents’ best interest that public notices could only be placed in paid publications.

Your primary reason to choose us for your legal notices is that we more than fulfill the legal requirements and can save your citizens thousands of dollars in the process.

Thomas F. Pounds is president and publisher of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Contact him at [email protected].

Can you name three Toledo-based innovations that changed the world? I’ve asked this question of many fellow Toledoans over the years. Unfortunately, the answers haven’t varied much — people almost always respond quickly with general references to “Jeeps and glass.” Beyond that, they struggle. Naming a third always proves difficult, even for die-hard Toledoans.

This ought not be the case. Toledo has an amazing history of world-changing innovation that should be a source of pride for all of us. Residents of most cities similar in size to Toledo can point to a few companies that have introduced well-known products in the past, but we’ve got so much more. Several Toledo companies have literally created new industries right here in our hometown. Several others introduced innovations that radically and permanently changed the course of their industries. Toledo has played a critical role in the development of everything from bicycles to interchangeable mufflers and from fountain pens to medical devices.

After doing just a small bit of research on the issue, I’ve discovered numerous examples that make picking a third example less difficult. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Thanks in large part to a lightweight wire wheel made by Toledo-based Gendron Iron Wheel Company, Toledo was once known as the “Coventry of America” after Coventry, England, then the center of the British bicycle industry.
• In the early 1900s, Toledo became the center of the fountain pen industry when the Conklin Pen Manufacturing Co. introduced a unique self-filling pen; Mark Twain endorsed the famous Conklin Crescent Filler as his pen of choice.
• Three seemingly unrelated industries — medical devices, cosmetics and paint-spraying equipment — are connected by innovations in fluid dispersion from Toledo’s own DeVilbiss family.

Our innovation history even goes beyond the introduction of new products based on local inventions. Several Toledo companies imported new ideas from elsewhere, bringing growth and jobs with them. Universal joints, electric auto lights and the Etch-a-Sketch were invented elsewhere but were innovated in Toledo. Even our lawyers have innovated over the years — Owens Corning’s PINK was the first successful registration of a color as a trademark.

Considering this plethora of examples, how can it be that we’re so unfamiliar with our bright and extensive innovation history?

It’s simple: We’ve forgotten.

As a community, we’ve forgotten that Toledo once thrived on disruptive innovation rather than suffered its consequences. We’ve forgotten that we used to import new ideas and leverage them into new businesses, growth and jobs. We’ve forgotten that we were once viewed as the hometown of great inventors and industrialists who introduced world-changing products. We’ve forgotten the great business stories behind the names we’ve always known  — DeVilbiss, Stranahan, Owens and many more.

We’re lucky, though, because we have that history. As a community we can, and should, reconnect with it and embrace it proudly. We should openly and actively celebrate the innovative spirit that fueled Toledo for decades. We should teach our innovation history to younger native Toledoans and communicate it proudly to new folks we welcome to the community. With a little effort, we could even use our proven innovation track record to direct our future. Embracing our history just might prove an important first step in repeating it.

J. Matthew Buchanan is a registered patent attorney, owner of Buchanan Nipper LLC and president and a CEO of Daystream Inc. in Perrysburg.

Sequester, minimum wage and jobs — it is all about the money. When looking at the headlines and the roles Democrats and Republicans have taken, one wonders if they even have a basic understanding of economics or the platforms their parties claim. Even John M. Keynes knew government involvement had its limits. The Democrats have become hawkish on military spending and the Republicans are running as fast as they can from spending cuts.

First, let’s look at sequester and what it means in terms of our government spending. In the debt ceiling round of dysfunction in Washington, the White House and Democrats proposed, and the Republicans agreed to, an automatic cut in spending that would occur if they did not reach another accord. This cut in spending is actually a decrease in the increase of spending to all the affected areas. Nowhere will any agency have less this year than last year. Of the examples touted in the news and from the government’s own reports as being on the chopping block, some are no longer agencies (The National Drug Intelligence Center) or are state-owned (Boca Raton Airport). Why are we paying for these?

The amount of spending sequestration represents with regard to the total allotment is miniscule (I avoid the term “budget,” as we haven’t had one in years). It is estimated at 1 to 3 percent of more than $1 trillion in spending. Those are huge numbers. Cuts as large as $85 billion have been discussed. Surely that would wreak havoc upon our floundering economy, hurt job growth and promote a zombie apocalypse. Not so much, when put in perspective. The idea that even a 3 percent cut in overall spending must come at the expense of vital programs is untrue.

The sequestration as written was intended to force Republicans to concede. It targeted programs generally popular in Republican circles (military) as well as popular with the general public (education, transportation). We see this tactic locally all the time, especially with school levies. They exclaim, “We must cut athletics, special education, extracurricular activities and we will bring harm to our teachers unless we get more funding.” There is never a real discussion of how and where the current funding is being spent (this is why a full audit of Toledo Public Schools is important).

Even more recently, scare tactics like the release of illegal immigrants by a department are meant to spur us (them) and it should. We need to demand full audits of all agencies, the Senate and House offices, The White House and certainly the Federal Reserve. We cannot afford these bloated entities. This will take years to accomplish so it is important to start now.

Discussion needs to be had on the idea of a $9 minimum wage. Having recently completed a college level introductory course in both macroeconomics and microeconomics, I can assure you they teach this concept early on. A price floor, which is a point that, by regulation, you cannot go below, has a definite effect on both supply and demand. In the case of the minimum wage, the supplier is the laborer and the demand or consumer is the business that would employ them. Recently, in these pages, a study by economists Card and Krueger was cited that states that a minimum-wage increase can strengthen job creation.

Economist Benjamin Powell recently debunked this oft-repeated study. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-powell/minimum-wage-merry-go-rou_b_2713136.html).

But the study doesn’t ask the right questions. The study shows that a minimum wage at or near the real equilibrium point will have little effect on unemployment. When the first national minimum wage went into effect in 1938 at 25 cents an hour, the prevailing wage for the majority was 60 cents an hour; it had little effect. That is except in Puerto Rico, where the average wage was 3 to 4 cents an hour. Forced to comply, the result was massive unemployment and businesses that went bankrupt. The example of San Francisco was brought up: it already pays more than the new proposed minimum and has an unemployment rate lower than the rest of California.

That is the free market at work. To say all of California, or all the states are homogenous is a mistake. To impose San Francisco rates on Fresno or Findlay would be devastating. If there is to be a minimum wage, it needs to be decided as locally as possible.

We must learn to ask the right questions. Right now the question we need to ask all our elected officials is, where is my audit?