COLUMBUS — Gov. John Kasich visited a legislative forum Wednesday to talk to an assemblage of reporters about the upcoming year, important issues and whether he’s looking at 2020 for a primary campaign against President Donald Trump.
Here are a few highlights of his hour-long speech:
Business Development
“Amazon is remarkable. Now everybody is going crazy about the headquarters. I don’t think we’ll get the headquarters. But I do know that we’re going to have 10,000 employees from Amazon. Three or four years ago, we had zero.”
“In terms of the way in which we offer (business) incentives, look, we do it on the basis of payroll. We’re not going to make up — so everybody goes out there and they’re, like, trying to buy the deal. I tell all the CEOs: we’re not buying the deal. If you don’t want to come here, that’s up to you. But we’re not going to go out there and give you the moon, the stars and the sky in order to get you to come here.”
Infrastructure
“So the president offered this infrastructure thing. I have no idea how much money is in it. They say it’s a trillion and a half and, I think they don’t have any money in it. Okay, so what’s going to happen is all the states and local governments are going to whine. That, by the way, is a regular occupation for state and local governments. Whining is endemic. It’s in the DNA, just whine, whine, whine.”
“What local governments have to do is start being creative. Don’t play politics. Think differently, because frankly, if we’re waiting for the president or Congress to fix all these problems we have, forget about it. Our problems get fixed when we decide to be active and do things from the bottom up.”
Education
“We need to teach resilience, and we need to teach the fact that you got to be open to change.”
“When the wave of the digital revolution comes, if we are not having a system to think about the future — that’s why I have a group thinking about what jobs we’re going to lose, what jobs are we going to gain — if we don’t have this and we don’t start training people that way, we’re going to be caught in an economic tsunami. And you think we have divisions in America today? Which we clearly do — the divide between rich and poor, between successful and unsuccessful, employed and unemployed — that’s what we’re going to face here.”
2020 Presidential Run
“In terms of running for president, I don’t know what I’m doing next week. Quite frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. … I don’t know what I’m doing at the end of my term. I know this will sound to some of you a little bit wacky maybe, but the Lord will decide what I’m going to do.”
Reach Josh Ellerbrock at 567-242-0398.
