08/30/2026
Ramaswamy showed up at the Darke County Fair with a list.
Lower property taxes.
Cheaper electricity.
Protect the farmland.
Make the data centers actually pay instead of taking sweetheart deals from Columbus.
Stop telling every kid they need $80,000 and four years to figure out they want to weld.
Okay. Good.
Those are things rural Ohio's been screaming about for twenty years while politicians nod and do nothing.
But here's the thing.
Eventually somebody's gotta balance a checkbook.
And right now, the math ain't working.
He wants to cut property taxes by a billion dollars.
He wants to get rid of the income tax altogether.
And at the same time, he wants Columbus to put more money into schools so your local property taxes don't have to carry the whole load.
Do that three times in your head.
Cut property taxes. Kill the income tax. Fund schools better.
Where's the money coming from?
This is Ohio. We don't have oil wells. We don't have a magical money tree behind the Statehouse. We have a checkbook, same as everybody else.
And if you've been farming in this county for forty years, you know what happens when somebody promises you the world while charging you less. Somebody's lying, or somebody's not done their math.
Property taxes suck. I'll say it straight up. Your grandpa should not lose his farm because the county reassessment got ridiculous. Families who paid off their mortgages shouldn't get priced out by taxes climbing faster than their retirement income. That's real.
But "we're gonna cut the tax" is not a plan.
That's a bumper sticker.
A plan tells you where the replacement money comes from, or what you're cutting.
Those are your choices. There is no third option.
Innovation Ohio did the math. Rolling back property taxes to 2021 levels costs billions a year in local government and school revenue. Yeah, they're a progressive outfit. Fine. But they asked the right question.
So where does the money come from?
Ramaswamy says growth and efficiency will fix it.
Maybe in thirty years. Meanwhile, your kid's school is understaffed, your road's got potholes nobody fixes, and your fire department's equipment is ten years old.
"Growth will pay for it" is the same thing politicians have been saying since 1985 while your local services keep getting skinnier.
I'd rather hear a number.
Then we get to data centers.
And this is where Ramaswamy gave a hell of a pitch to people who've been watching Meta and the rest of them move in through the back door.
No sweetheart tax deals.
Free electricity for people living nearby.
Keep it off the farmland. Use the old industrial sites.
Closed-loop cooling. No eminent domain. No secret NDAs.
Stop approving new projects until you actually protect local communities.
On the surface? That's what we've been asking for.
It's also exactly what we should've gotten five years ago when developers started knocking on county commission doors with envelopes full of confidentiality agreements.
But here's where it gets fuzzy.
What's "nearby"?
If they build a data center two miles from my house, do I get free power? Five miles? Ten?
What about the farmer with a transmission line running through his corn field to feed the thing?
What about the deals that are already signed?
Are they grandfathered in, or do the new rules blow those up?
Who's paying for new power lines?
Who pays when electricity usage jumps twenty percent?
Do homeowners get the tax revenue from the data center, or does it go to schools, or does it get split four ways so nobody gets enough to fix anything?
Because you cannot spend the same dollar four times, even though Columbus keeps trying.
Ramaswamy talked about vocational education too.
Good.
Darke County knows what we need. Not more college kids moving back to Columbus. Welders. Electricians. Machinists. Nurses. Mechanics. People who actually build things and fix things and farm things.
Our schools are supposed to make that happen.
But it costs money.
And we're back to the checkbook problem again.
He says reduce schools' dependence on property taxes. I agree. Ohio's been broken on education funding for twenty years. Too much pressure on homeowners, not enough money actually reaching classrooms.
But Ohio's got a Fair School Funding Plan sitting there, waiting for somebody to finish it.
Does Ramaswamy support it?
Does he want to throw it out and start over?
Modify it?
Nobody should have to guess.
And I'm tired of guessing.
I don't care if he's got an R or she's got a D after her name. If you show up to Darke County promising lower taxes, better schools, cheaper power, protected farms and strong communities, I want the math. Not a speech. Not after the election. Before it.
Come to the fair. Check the box. Land the quote. That's fine.
But showing up ain't the same thing as having a plan.
So here's what I want to know:
How much does the property-tax cut cost?
What makes up the lost money?
How do you eliminate income tax while giving schools more?
Exactly who gets the free electricity? The farmer? The folks living five miles away? The school district?
Who's paying for the new power lines? The data center? The utility? Us?
What happens to the projects already approved?
What happens to farmland sitting where the next transmission corridor needs to go?
And when billion-dollar corporations show up with lawyers and lobbyists, what authority do you actually have?
These aren't trick questions.
These are the questions people ask when they have to balance a checkbook.
Farmer questions. Homeowner questions. Renter questions. School questions.
Rural Ohio questions.
Because out here we know something politicians forget once the camera goes on:
A promise takes thirty seconds.
A plan takes a spreadsheet and an honest answer.
And if the numbers underneath the promise don't add up, somebody pays the bill.
It usually ain't the billionaire on stage.
By Korey Richards
Central Committee member
P.S. “I gotta chuckle at the hay bales. Nothing says ‘man of the soil’ quite like a billionaire posing on borrowed straw.
