Acton made it up. Brown voted for it. Ohio has two Democrats on the ballot this fall, and early voting opened today, so I graded both of them with the same red pen I use in my classroom. Amy Acton wants to be governor. Sherrod Brown wants his old Senate seat back.
Acton posted five scary numbers about Vivek Ramaswamy’s tax plan Monday night. I checked every one. Not one, as written, describes his plan. Brown does not need to make anything up, because he already has a voting record, and I pulled it. Real roll calls.
Put them together and you get one platform: spend it now, hide the price, cut the first rung off the ladder, and mail the invoice to the kid in the second row.
Pour a coffee. This is a long one, and I promise it is worth the refill.
I teach Physics and Anatomy. In my classroom, if you turn in data you borrowed from another lab group and write your name on it, that is called cheating. If you skip the lab and hope nobody checks your old grades, that is called hoping. In Ohio politics, apparently, both are called a campaign.
Here is Acton’s thread, for the record:
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Within hours, @VivekGRamaswamy
quote-posted it: “More lies. If only we could debate it.” I will let the comment section handle the debate question. They have been asking it all week, and nobody on her team seems to have an answer that fits in a press release.
— PART ONE: AMY ACTON’S HOMEWORK —
Ladies first. Even though she will not tell me what a woman is.
I grade on precision, so here is the record. On June 30, she told the Toledo Blade, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Good. She said BOYS. Then the Ohio Democratic Party Pride Caucus answered, “Trans girls are girls,” Equality Ohio knocked her grade from an A down to a B, and she has not said “boys” since. A month later she was adding gender to a new anti-discrimination promise and calling the youth medical fight a scare tactic about “personal decisions.”
I teach Anatomy, so I will finish the sentence she will not. A woman is an adult human female. Large gamete. XX in the typical case. That took me one line. She has had all year.
Now, claim by claim.
— CLAIM ONE: “A 20% SALES TAX, THE HIGHEST IN THE COUNTRY” —
This number exists. It just does not live where she says it lives.
In February, Governor DeWine’s Office of Budget and Management wrote a memo about what would happen if Ohio abolished local property taxes ENTIRELY. That is more than $20 billion a year. OBM estimated you would need a replacement sales tax somewhere around 15 to 18 percent on top of the current state rate of 5.75 percent. DeWine said a constitutional abolition could push it toward 20 percent and called that devastating.
Fair enough. Now read Vivek’s actual plan: roll property taxes back to pre-pandemic levels, put a cap on them, and phase out the state income tax over eight to ten years, starting with capital gains.
Yes, he floated full abolition when he launched. Look it up. By July he was saying “not eliminate them.” She is running against the March draft of his plan like a student who studied the wrong chapter and is furious the test does not match her notes.
Logicians call that the straw man fallacy: build a fake version of your opponent’s argument, punch it in the face, and post a selfie with the bruised scarecrow. Whoever signed off on it is sharp as a bowling ball and twice as round on the facts.
— CLAIM TWO: “A NEW TAX ON FOOD AND HEALTH CARE” —
Same memo. Same mistake.
Taxing groceries and health care was one of the options OBM listed for keeping the rate from hitting 20 percent under full abolition. An OPTION. In a memo. Written for DeWine. Not written by Ramaswamy, not proposed by Ramaswamy, not endorsed by Ramaswamy.
Pinning that on him is like blaming me for the plot of a movie because I once walked past the theater. The lights are on at Acton headquarters, but I am starting to think the research department went home in March.
Today your combined sales tax in Ohio sits around 6.5 to 8 percent, depending on your county. Nobody’s grocery receipt changed because of a Monday night tweet. The wheel is spinning in that comms shop, but the hamster has been dead since spring.
— CLAIM THREE: “PROPERTY TAXES UP 20%” —
This one is my favorite, because it is the cleanest inversion in the whole thread. His property-tax plan is a CUT. She told you it is a 20 percent HIKE.
Where did 20 percent come from? A left-leaning group called Innovation Ohio modeled what it would take to replace the roughly $10 billion income tax with zero growth and zero cuts. Their answer: a 65 percent sales-tax hike OR a 20 percent property-tax hike. A critic’s hypothetical. She took the critic’s homework, wrote Vivek’s name at the top, and turned it in.
If brains were dynamite, the person who approved that graphic could not blow her nose. That is two sandwiches short of a picnic, and somebody already ate the cooler.
— CLAIM FOUR: “$4 BILLION CUT FROM SCHOOLS, MASSIVE TEACHER LAYOFFS” —
I am a teacher. I work in a high-need district. If someone were actually cutting $4 billion out of Ohio classrooms, I would be the first person on this app screaming about it, and you know I can scream.
The same Innovation Ohio analysis puts a rollback to tax year 2021 at about $4 billion off TOTAL property-tax collections. Total. Not schools. The school share is about $2.4 billion today, and it only climbs toward $4 billion in their later-year projections. So she took the whole pie, called it the school slice, and then added “massive teacher layoffs,” which does not appear in any analysis as a finding.
Now something her campaign has not done once in this race. A multi-billion-dollar rollback with no state backfill WOULD hit districts. That is a real question. Vivek owes Ohio a line-item answer on how schools and townships get made whole, and I want to hear it.
She never asked it. She skipped the honest question and went straight to the made-up answer. That is the political version of a student who cannot solve the equation, so she writes “infinity” and draws a sad face. All hat, no cattle, and the hat is borrowed.
— CLAIM FIVE: “32,000 FIRST RESPONDERS LAID OFF” —
I was a civilian paramedic. I was an Army combat medic. So let me tell you how this one lands with me.
An advocacy group called Ohioans to Protect Public Services estimated that FULL abolition of property taxes, with NO replacement at all, could jeopardize more than 32,000 police, fire, EMS, and dispatcher jobs. “Could jeopardize.” Under a plan nobody is running on.
She turned that into “Ramaswamy’s plan WOULD lay off 32,000 first responders.” His campaign says first responders will not be harmed. Townships really do lean on property tax, and that is a real fiscal conversation. The 32,000 layoff number is not.
The Latin name for this one is argumentum ad metum, the appeal to fear. Scare people badly enough and they stop checking your math. Jim Quinn put it more simply in his Laws of Liberalism: liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it. Somebody give that man a pension.
Using paramedics and firefighters as props in a tax ad is about as low as a snake’s belly in a wagon rut. I have carried the stretcher. You do not get to carry it for a campaign graphic.
— BONUS LIES FROM THE SAME CAMPAIGN —
The thread was not a one-off. It is a pattern.
o Her campaign said Ramaswamy “made $2 billion from the COVID vaccine.” The real deal was a corporate patent settlement worth UP TO $2.25 billion, payable to two companies, Genevant and Arbutus. Not to him personally. About $950 million had been paid, and the rest depended on a court ruling. Somebody played telephone with a court filing, and the people on the other end were one bubble off plumb.
o She said he would close universities, including Shawnee State. He said in March that Ohio has too many universities and they should consolidate. His campaign said he is not eliminating Ohio’s universities, and by summer he had narrowed it to duplicative programs. Shawnee State does not appear in any of those remarks. She did not shade the truth. She brought her own crayons.
o She attacked him for holding “millions in every level of the data-center industry.” His disclosures show Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and a semiconductor fund, $1 to $5 million, in 2023. A stock portfolio is not an Ohio data center. And now the part I love: she held Microsoft and Iron Mountain herself until she sold her individual stocks on April 10, 2026. Her own running mate’s disclosure still lists Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Jim Quinn’s Law number 2: if you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing. Not only did she accuse him of it… wait, I am being told she was doing it six months ago.
o The classic. On March 12, 2020, as state health director, she told Ohio that more than 100,000 Ohioans already had COVID. The next day it was described as a “guesstimate.” Ohio’s hospital and death numbers did not support that scale. Later she said COVID mortality fell from 50 percent to 5 percent between March and June. Her campaign said she meant hospital mortality. The 50 came from small groups of ICU patients and the 5 came from all hospitalized patients. Two different groups, stapled together into one dramatic slide. This is not her first trip to the made-up number buffet. She has a frequent diner card.
Since her campaign likes to invent things, let me show you how easy it is. I have it on good authority that Vivek’s plan also includes a 40 percent tax on unicorn feed, mandatory quarterly filing for every Holstein in Wayne County, and a secret clause requiring Ohio State to forfeit every Michigan game until 2040 to pay for alien landing pads in Dayton. A Bigfoot in Hocking Hills will serve as Lieutenant Treasurer. Sources? Trust me. A group modeled it.
See? Making stuff up takes eleven seconds. Facts take homework. I did the homework.
— PART TWO: SHERROD BROWN’S REPORT CARD —
Acton invents numbers. Brown does not have to. He has a record. This is the special election for the seat JD Vance left. Jon Husted holds it now. Sherrod Brown lost it in 2024 and wants it back. He has been out of the Senate since January 2025, so every vote below is from his old seat. I checked each one against the Senate roll call. Dates are there so you can check me too. Facts are cheaper than my opinion, and they come with free shipping.
HEALTH CARE. December 24, 2009, Brown voted YES on Senate passage of the Affordable Care Act, H.R. 3590. Then look at the government’s own report card. HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation found average individual-market premiums in the 39 HealthCare.gov states went from $232 a month in 2013 to $477 in 2017. Up 105 percent. Yes, the plans were not identical and most exchange buyers got a subsidy. The sticker price still doubled. Then deductibles climbed until people held an insurance card they could not afford to use.
So his party papered over it with temporary COVID subsidies in the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, wrote the expiration date into the law THEMSELVES, and blamed Republicans when the cliff they built arrived. Brown voted yes on both.
@SherrodBrown, that subsidy cliff has your fingerprints on the shovel.
And while we are here: since the ACA took full effect in 2014, the seven largest health insurers went from about $511 billion in revenue to about $1.5 trillion. Tripled. So why is the party of “eat the rich” so devoted to a law that made the biggest insurance companies in America richer than ever, instead of putting the money in your own Health Savings Account where YOU control it? The left spent a whole year acting like insurance executives were the villain of the century. Then they went right back to defending the law that feeds them. Pick a side.
SPENDING. March 6, 2021, Brown voted YES on the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. It passed 50 to 49. Every Republican who voted, voted no. In June 2022, consumer prices hit 9.1 percent, the highest in forty years. I am not going to tell you one bill caused every point of that, because that would be the exact kind of overclaim I just spent five sections grading Acton for. I will tell you the sequence: he voted for the money, the money went out, and the price tag showed up at the checkout lane.
August 7, 2022, he voted YES on the Inflation Reduction Act, H.R. 5376. CBO scored that bill as reducing the deficit on paper, and I will give you that. My objection is what was in it: clean-energy subsidies, a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, a stock-buyback tax, and a big increase in IRS funding. They named it the Inflation Reduction Act after the fire was already burning. That is like naming your arsonist the Fire Prevention Committee.
TAXES. December 20, 2017, Brown voted NO on the final Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the bill that cut individual rates and set the corporate rate at 21 percent. Campaign ads never mention this part. Corporations do not pay taxes. They collect them. The bill gets passed to the customer in prices, to the worker in smaller raises, and to the shareholder, which includes every teacher, cop, and plumber with a pension or a 401(k). Voting no on the cut and yes on the buyback tax and corporate minimum is the same direction twice.
And I keep seeing Democrats chant “Tax the Rich” from a building full of millionaires who know every loophole because they wrote them. So, Senator Brown, my standing offer, and it applies to any politician who says it: pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe this year. Standard deduction only. No itemizing, no foundation, no clever timing. Post the return. Then we will listen to the sermon. Until then, it is a tithe you demand from everyone except the pulpit.
If you want to know how the federal income tax turned into an invisible straw in your paycheck, it started in 1913, and the Founders had a better system in Article I, Section 9: https://x.com/i/article/2105659885782212608
STUDENT LOANS. June 1, 2023, Brown voted NO on H.J.Res. 45, the resolution to block Biden’s Autopen student-loan cancellation rule. Cancellation is not forgiveness. It is a bill moved to someone who never signed it. The electrician, the welder, and the soldier who enlisted to pay for college pick up the tab for a voluntary loan somebody else took out. If that is how debt works now, I have a mortgage I would like the renters down the street to pay off for me.
ENERGY. He voted NO on authorizing Keystone XL in 2012, 2014, and the 2015 veto override. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 93 percent lifetime score and endorsed him for this race on November 10, 2025. Ohio still has refinery workers, steel, and natural gas. His energy record treats that payroll as the problem. Shutting down the pipeline does not retire the barrel. It just moves the job, and the emissions, to a country with worse rules.
GUNS. April 17, 2013, he voted YES on Feinstein Amendment 711, the assault-weapons ban. It failed 40 to 60. What they wanted to ban was mostly the AR-15, or as I like to say it, the ArmaLite Rifle model 15, because “AR” never stood for “assault rifle.” It stands for ArmaLite, the company that designed it. An actual assault rifle can fire full-auto or burst, and those have been heavily regulated since 1934, with new ones off the civilian market since 1986. Brown voted to ban a rifle that fires one round per trigger pull, like a deer rifle. And if he thinks banning things works, I would like to introduce him to Prohibition, which took a whole constitutional amendment to start and another one to undo.
https://x.com/i/article/2084072827020353536
ABORTION. February 28, 2022, he voted YES to advance the Women’s Health Protection Act, H.R. 3755. The motion failed. That bill would have overridden state abortion laws nationwide and protected abortion before viability, with a broad life-or-health exception after it. Ohio already voted on its own law. A senator who votes to federalize it is voting to overrule Ohio from Washington. For the record, I am pro-choice. Every body gets a choice. Including the one with its own DNA.
https://x.com/i/article/2024575624006766592
SANCTUARY. October 20, 2015, he voted NO on advancing the Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act, S. 2146. That was a procedural cloture vote, not final passage, and I will say so because accuracy is free. The bill would have withheld certain federal grants from sanctuary jurisdictions and raised penalties for some illegal reentries. A no on cutting off sanctuary money is still a no on enforcement. His party turned “sanctuary” from a church word into a policy that hands people with criminal convictions back to the street instead of to ICE, then sues every time someone tries to audit the results. The party of crime does not need a new slogan. It needs a mirror.
If you want an immigration fix the left could not honestly oppose, start with the employers who hire illegal labor and hold deportation over a worker’s head. That is the plantation with a payroll, and this is how we break it: https://x.com/i/article/2106226621837443072
— PART THREE: WHERE ACTON AND BROWN ARE THE SAME CANDIDATE —
Two names. One platform. Watch how often the governor promise and the Senate vote are the same thing wearing different shirts.
— THEY BOTH WANT YOU TO PAY FOR IT, THEY JUST WILL NOT SAY HOW —
Nobody in her press shop caught the punchline. Her entire attack is “he has no plan to pay for it.”
Now open HER platform.
o Fully fund the Fair School Funding Plan, which Republican scoring puts near $2 billion.
o Expand the homestead exemption.
o Mail property-tax rebates of up to $1,000.
o A refundable earned-income credit and a new child tax credit, $1,000 under age 7 and $500 from 7 to 18, for households up to $85,000. Refundable means a check bigger than what the household paid in. That is spending, not a tax cut.
o “Expand access” on top of a Medicaid program that already covers about one in four Ohioans and cost $34.2 billion in fiscal year 2024.
o “End medical debt.”
The porch light is on over there, but nobody is home. Price tag for all of that? Not in the posts. Pay-for? Not in the posts. Which tax goes up? Not in the posts. She is attacking Vivek for an unpaid bill while running up a tab at the same bar.
Credit where due: she says she supports Medicaid work requirements and fraud enforcement. Good. That part is the opposite of a blank check. The expansion promise sitting next to it is the blank check.
And “end medical debt”? If only somebody would pass a federal law to make health care affordable. We could call it the Affordable Care Act. Somebody should really try that… oh wait, somebody just told me her party already did, and the same Sherrod Brown on your ballot voted for it. We will get to how that went.
Since we are handing out free stuff with no receipt, I have a few proposals of my own. Free Graeter’s black raspberry chip every Monday for every Ohioan, and the stores just eat the cost. A living wage for every student who shows up to my Anatomy class on time, regardless of age. A state-funded golden retriever for every apartment. Mandatory GPA sharing, where the kids with a 4.0 donate half a point to the kids with a 1.2, because everyone does better when we share. It is just common sense. This is not a radical thing.
And Brown already showed you what happens when this party gets the checkbook with no pay-for attached. He voted for the $1.9 trillion Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, then voted no on letting you keep more of your own paycheck in 2017. Acton is promising the spending. Brown already cast it. One is the trailer. The other is the movie, and we all sat through it at 9.1 percent inflation.
— BOTH OF THEM WANT TO SAW OFF THE FIRST RUNG: JIM CROW WITH A NEW BUMPER STICKER —
On January 5, 2026, she posted that as governor she will “raise the minimum wage.” No number. Ohio is already at $11, indexed to inflation, going to $11.40 on January 1, 2027. A governor cannot decree a bigger jump anyway. That takes a statute or another constitutional amendment. The direction is still hers, and the direction is the problem.
I am not saying Amy Acton or Sherrod Brown is a racist. I am saying both of them are selling a policy with a Jim Crow pedigree and a Jim Crow result, and they either do not know the history or do not care. Pick one. Neither is a qualification for governor or senator.
Start with what the word means. A living WAGE. Read the second word. A wage is earned. It is what your work is worth to the person paying for it. A brain surgeon earns more than a burger flipper because the skill is rarer and the stakes are higher. Call it cruel if you want. It is also the only reason anyone bothers to learn a skill in the first place.
So who actually earns the minimum? Mostly young people. Workers under 25 have made up nearly half of the people at or below the federal minimum for years, and a lot of them still live at home. What does a sixteen-year-old need to live? A Starbucks, a movie on Friday, and gas money. The first job is not supposed to support a family of four. It is supposed to teach a kid to show up on time, take direction from a boss, and earn a raise. The first job is a ladder, not a couch.
I wrote that whole argument here. Read the living wage section before you vote: https://x.com/i/article/2106454175143821312
Now the receipts. The Congressional Budget Office scored a $15 federal wage in July 2019 (CBO publication 55410). Fully phased in by 2025, in an average week:
o 17 million workers who would otherwise earn under $15 get a raise.
o Another 10 million earning a bit more than $15 might get one too.
o 1.3 million fewer people in poverty.
o And 1.3 million FEWER JOBS at the median estimate, with a two-thirds chance the loss runs from about zero to 3.7 million.
o Real family income DOWN about $9 billion in 2025, mostly lost business income and higher prices.
o The same bill phased out the lower minimums for teens, tipped workers, and workers with disabilities.
The raise and the pink slip are the same law. You do not get one without the other. And in 2021, CBO scored the Raise the Wage Act as adding $54 billion to the deficit over ten years (CBO publication 56975). So it costs jobs AND it costs money. Remarkable efficiency. If you are going to light the house on fire, at least do not send the taxpayers the bill for the matches.
Who gets cut first? Not the manager with ten years in. The 16-year-old with no diploma, no resume, and no ladder. In my building, that is not a statistic. That is the kid in the second row.
The history is not subtle:
o 1931, Davis-Bacon. A prevailing-wage law aimed at contractors winning federal jobs with lower-paid Black crews.
o 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act. Southern Democrats carved out agriculture and domestic work, the exact jobs where Black workers were concentrated.
o Progressive-era wage advocates wrote openly about using a wage floor to push “unemployables” out of the labor market. They told you what it was for.
o Thomas Sowell’s record: in 1948, Black and white 16- and 17-year-old males had about the same unemployment rate. After the wage escalations, the Black teen rate ran more than double, and in bad years it cleared 30 to 40 percent. Skills and discrimination were WORSE in the earlier period, when the gap was smaller. What changed was the legal price of entry-level labor.
o Milton Friedman, 1966, called the minimum wage one of the most anti-Black laws on the books.
o David Neumark’s research finds the employment hit lands several times harder on Black teens than white teens.
The full history is in JIM CROW 2.0: HOW THE MINIMUM WAGE BECAME THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S FAVORITE RACIST LAW OF THE LEFT:
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And if someone in the replies tells you “the parties switched,” please hand them this before they hurt themselves: https://x.com/i/article/2019491878752718848
Jim Quinn’s Law number 9: to liberals, intentions are more significant than the outcomes they achieve. Nobody votes for a wage hike because they want to lock a Black teenager out of his first job. They just do it, every time, and call it compassion.
Same mechanism, now with a boat attached. In 1990, Congress slapped a luxury tax on yachts to make “the rich” pay. The rich bought their boats overseas. About 12,000 American workers who BUILT the boats lost their jobs. Not one yacht owner went hungry. Congress repealed the tax a few years later, and the industry spent a decade climbing back. Tax the boat, and the welder pays. Price the first job above what a beginner can produce, and the beginner pays. The bill always lands on the worker. Every time. It is practically a law of physics.
https://x.com/i/article/2058932782689116160
Acton only promised it. Brown already voted for it. On March 5, 2021, he voted YES for the amendment to jam $15 into the American Rescue Plan. It failed 42 to 58. Two months later he posted asking Republicans to pass the PRO Act and raise the minimum wage in the same breath. Sherrod has been running for his old seat like a man returning a shirt without the receipt, and that vote is the receipt.
Follow it to the end. The kid who never gets the first job never gets the second job. No resume, no references, no ladder. So he lands on unemployment, then welfare, then waits for the next politician who promises a bigger check. That is not a working class. That is a dependent class, and a dependent class votes for whoever controls the check. The antebellum South needed an underclass to stay in power. The modern Democrat machine runs the same math with an EBT card instead of a ledger.
So I will ask Dr. Acton and Senator Brown the question I ask every Democrat: what have you done to help people that was not a handout funded by somebody else’s paycheck?
— UNION-ONLY, CARD CHECK, AND A CLOSED SIGN ON OHIO —
Her platform says data centers must be built exclusively with union labor, only on brownfields, with a preference for carbon-free power. If a project does not meet those conditions, her words: “we do not want you in Ohio.”
That is not a jobs plan. That is a CLOSED sign with a union bug on it.
Construction is where the jobs are. Union-only shrinks who can bid. A farmland ban shrinks where you can build. And preferring carbon-free over the gas and nuclear that actually carry a data-center load is the same move as shutting down a refinery: the work leaves, the electric bill stays, and the emissions move to a state with looser rules. Ohio does not get a cleaner planet. Ohio gets a smaller payroll.
Now add Brown. The AFL-CIO gives him a 99 percent lifetime score. His May 2021 post asked Republicans to pass the PRO Act. That bill pushes card check, replacing a private union election with signatures collected where the organizer knows exactly who said no. A man who talks about protecting your vote, then takes the private vote away at the plant gate, is running the same play in two different rooms.
Acton wants union-only construction. Brown wants card check. Between the two of them, nobody gets hired without the union’s permission, and nobody gets to vote against the union in private. Notice the cousin of Davis-Bacon hiding in there. Exclusive union labor was the tool in 1931 that kept non-union Black crews off federal jobs. Same price floor. New hard hat.
Meanwhile, Ohio school districts around New Albany and Licking County are already cashing data-center checks. In 2024, data-center land alone sent $2.67 million to Licking Heights schools, $2.51 million to Johnstown-Monroe, and $1.93 million to New Albany-Plain. A school board can spend a line item like that this year. She wants to tell the next one to go build in Indiana.
The numbers, not the feelings:
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And the energy side, nuclear, refineries, and imported crude, in my GOP environmental platform:
https://x.com/i/article/2104734918529929216
— THE RECORD OHIO ALREADY LIVED THROUGH, TWICE —
She wants you to imagine what Ohio would be like with her in charge. You do not have to imagine. We did that already.
In 2020, Dr. Acton was the face of the state’s stay-at-home orders. Schools closed. Businesses closed. The kids who lost the most learning were in districts like mine, the ones who could least afford to lose a single week. I watched it from the front of the room. In a high-need district, a lot of kids did not have a reliable screen to begin with.
Brown has the same problem. From 2009 to 2022, he voted for the health care law that doubled the sticker price, the spending that came before the inflation, and the subsidy cliff his own party wrote. Both of them are applying for a job they already held. The governor’s race and the Senate race are not auditions. They are rehires. She already had a job running a piece of Ohio, and the kids in my building are still paying for that performance review.
So now she wants to be in charge of the schools, the budget, and the economy. What is next, she shuts down every classroom in the state for months and calls it public health… wait. Someone in the back row just reminded me. She already did that.
What Ohio could actually be, with schools, power, and housing fixed in ten years:
OHIO WAS FIRST IN FLIGHT. IT’S TIME WE WERE FIRST IN EVERYTHING ELSE.
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How to Fix Schools, Power, Housing, and the $10B Veterans Promise in 10 Years (Full Blueprint)
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— WHERE I GIVE THEM BOTH CREDIT —
Red pen goes both ways. Each of them earns a point.
ACTON’S A. On August 7, 2026, she broke with Ohio Democrats and said she supports Issue 3, the constitutional amendment locking in photo ID to vote, with the condition that the ID be free and easy to get. Good. I agree. My students get an ID at the BMV to buy cold medicine. Free ID for every citizen is exactly what I have been asking for. She gets a second point for the Toledo Blade line on girls’ sports. Then she loses half of it for going quiet the minute her own Pride Caucus objected. A position you only say once is not a position. It is a trial balloon.
Now look at what that tells you. When she breaks from her party, it makes headlines. Which means the rest of the platform, the wage floor, the union-only rule, the unpaid spending, the tax thread, IS the party line. The caveat is the ad. The party is the product. You are not hiring the one good vote. You are hiring the whole bench, and the bench is coached by the people who brought you the next section.
BROWN’S POINTS, AND THE ADS I WILL NOT REPEAT.
I just spent thousands of words grading Acton for sloppy numbers and Brown for real ones. I am not going to turn around and do the same thing. These fail my lab report, even though they would help my side:
o The ads saying Brown voted to hand Social Security, Medicaid, and COVID checks to illegal immigrants have been rated false. Those votes did not do that. Do not repeat them.
o Brown co-sponsored the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, which became law in 2024. He voted for the PACT Act on burn pits and toxic exposure. As a combat medic who served in Iraq, I will say thank you for that one, Senator.
o His votes for Justice Jackson and the Respect for Marriage Act were not party-line walls. Three Republicans voted for Jackson. Rob Portman, Ohio’s own Republican senator at the time, voted yes on the marriage bill.
The real votes are bad enough. You do not need to invent any. That is the whole difference between my article and her thread.
— WHAT HUSTED HAS ACTUALLY DONE IN THE SEAT —
The other column.
o He voted for the 2025 tax law that raised the child tax credit to $2,200 and added the temporary deductions for tips and overtime. That is money staying in a waitress’s apron instead of a Treasury account.
o He voted for the HALT Fentanyl Act, which passed 84 to 16 and became law.
o He introduced the Susan Muffley Act for the Delphi salaried retirees whose pensions were cut. Northeast Ohio remembers Delphi.
o He introduced S. 5271 in August 2026 to require photo ID at the polls and voted to open debate. Cloture failed, 52 to 46. His opponents’ party filibustered a photo ID bill a 16-year-old could satisfy at the BMV.
o Last week, Democrats filibustered his Ratepayer Protection Act, 57 to 43. It would make data centers over 100 megawatts pay for the generation and transmission they force the grid to build, instead of folding that cost into YOUR electric bill. Four Democrats crossed over. The rest did not. That is the right way to fight the data-center fight: put the wire cost on the user, not a moratorium on the town.
The choice is not complicated. Brown’s column is a wage floor, card check, a pipeline veto, a federal abortion statute, an assault-weapons ban, and two spending bills with your name on the invoice. Husted’s column is photo ID, a fentanyl scheduling law, a tax bill that lets you keep more of the paycheck, and a data-center bill that bills the data center.
Husted is the paycheck. Brown is the bill.
— THE QUESTION FOR BOTH OF THEM: THE WOUNDED VETERAN TAX —
The vote I actually care about? Neither candidate has cast it.
About 54,000 combat-wounded veterans were medically retired before twenty years because of their injuries. The federal government claws back their military retirement dollar for dollar against their VA disability. The fix is the Major Richard Star Act. In the Senate it is S. 1032. Bernie Moreno is a cosponsor. I did not find Jon Husted or Sherrod Brown on the list. Brown could not sign it because he has been out of the Senate since January 2025. Husted can.
So, Senator Husted: you want Ohio’s veterans to show up for you this fall? Put your name on S. 1032. Ohio, call the Senate switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for Husted’s office. Tell them a combat-wounded veteran’s retirement should not be taxed by his own government. Then ask them for a yes.
In the House, it is H.R. 2102, and the discharge petition is H.Res. 1247. If your representative co-sponsored H.R. 2102, call (202) 225-3121 and ask them to sign the petition. Co-sponsoring a bill and then never forcing a vote is all talk, no action.
— WHAT HONEST CAMPAIGNS WOULD HAVE SAID —
This is what actually gets under my skin. There IS a real criticism Acton could have made. A property-tax rollback worth billions plus a $10 billion income-tax phaseout, with no published backfill, lands on schools, townships, and the general fund unless growth or cuts cover it. Fair question. Sharp question. Grown-up question.
She did not ask it. She grabbed a DeWine memo about a plan nobody is proposing, a critic’s replacement scenario, an advocacy group’s worst case, and a total-collections number mislabeled as schools, then stapled Vivek’s face to all of it.
That is not a campaign. That is a group project where one kid copied four other groups and hopes the teacher does not notice.
The teacher noticed. And Brown? He is the student who failed the class in 2024 and is back in the same seat hoping the teacher forgot his old report card. I did not forget. I printed it.
Ohio, early voting is open. Read the plans, not the panic. If a candidate cannot tell the difference between a memo, a model, and a proposal, ask yourself what she will do with a $34 billion Medicaid budget and a state checkbook. You would not hand your debit card to someone who cannot read a bank statement, and this campaign could not find Columbus with a map, a compass, and a buckeye tree pointing the way.
And when the same party sends you a Senate candidate who voted for the premium hike, the spending, the wage floor that cuts the first job, and the tax hike disguised as inflation relief, then asks you for the seat back like nothing happened? Ohio already watched that episode. Brown is asking for a rerun.
Acton is the promise. Brown is the proof of what the promise costs. Same party, same playbook, two different ballot lines.
Wake up, Ohio. The lab results are in. For both of them.
But what do I know, I am only a science teacher who actually read the memo she was quoting and the roll calls he hopes you forgot.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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