NEW PHILADELPHIA − The Republican nominee for Ohio governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, says data centers need to pay for their own electricity and water and likened a ban on them to the pandemic shutdowns and restrictions of 2020 and 2021.
During a question-and-answer session on his June 5 campaign stop at the Buckeye Career Center, a woman told Ramaswamy that the only people she knows not supporting him for governor “are afraid of data centers,” and she asked about his stance.
Data centers are like any other form of manufacturing or business, he said, and the operation of a private business should not cause residents’ electric bills to go up.
“If you’re going to use energy, pay for your own energy rather than passing the bill onto the consumer,” he said.
“If you’re going to use the water, pay for it or procure your own water instead of using the water that everyone else depends on as a public utility. That’s not too much to ask. … It’s only fair if you use it, you pay for it. Period.”
The GOP nominee said as governor he would fix the issue of a lack of regulation requiring data centers pay for the resources they use.
“But I don’t want to go the other way then and say, ‘Ok, here’s this thing and kind of not doing things quite the right way right now. Let’s ban it.’ I think it would be a terrible idea. We complained for years, correctly complained about high paying jobs and deindustrialization just leaving our state. Now you have a different form of reindustrialization and high-paying jobs coming back to our state. Are we going to complain and say we don’t want that? Of course, not. To the contrary, we want to prepare ourselves for leadership in the sectors of the future.”
He said it was part of a “left-wing world view” to restrict beneficial economic activity.
“What do they say for years? ‘Well, oil and gas is bad. It’s harming the environment causing global climate change. Shut it down. We want to ban it.’ I’ll tell you, more people have died as a consequence of restrictive energy policies than have died from climate change itself,” Ramaswamy said.
“COVID, what did you see? The same thing. … ‘Shut it down. Shut down the economy.’ More people were harmed because of restrictive COVID policies than were actually harmed by the virus itself. So we learn this time and again. Restrictive policies hurt the very people that they were supposed to help.”
Ramaswamy said improved chips don’t need as much water for cooling, which new data centers should use to reduce their use of water.
Ramaswamy pledges
He said he would reduce Ohioans electric bills by increasing the supply of energy and using Ohio’s vast natural gas.
“We’re going to drill. We’re going to frack. We won’t apologize for it,” he said.
Ramaswamy said he would phase out Ohio’s income tax and reduce Ohioans’ property taxes by reducing the layers of 2,000 Ohio taxing authorities.
“It’s like a wedding cake of overlapping jurisdictions. We’ve got to delayer that. That’s how we bring down property taxes.”
Blaming fraud
A retiree in the audience told Ramaswamy that while he gets annual increases in his Social Security payment, the annual increases in the premium for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit more than offset the Social Security hike.
Ramaswamy said much of the reason, but not the sole reason, for the higher costs of Medicare and Medicaid is fraud. Ramaswamy said at least 10%, of Medicaid dollars paid out in Ohio was to fraudsters “overbilling the system” and raising health-care costs for everyone.
He said as governor he would significantly reduce Medicaid fraud and negotiate with the federal government where Ohio would keep two-thirds of the savings and Ohioans would enjoy funding for copay assistance, lower Medicare and Medicaid premiums and government contributions to Ohioans’ supplemental health-savings accounts.
“So, it’s not only the fact that we’re going to (recover) the waste, prosecute the bad guys, prosecute them aggressively, don’t hedge, don’t dither around, go hard, send a message, take the money from the bad guys and put it in the pockets of the good guys, the people who are following the law and working and meeting the work requirements. That’s not hard. That’s No. 1,” said Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy said he would fight urban crime and that law enforcement in Ohio would fully cooperate with federal law enforcement, a reference to some local governments refusing to cooperate with immigration enforcement. He said he would be Ohio’s most conservative governor while his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, would be a “socialist” governor.
A ‘warm hug’
Sheryl Wise, 65, of Scioto Township in Pickaway County, south of Columbus, said she drove more than two and a half hours to hear Ramaswamy’s thoughts on data centers before a crowd of more than 100. The retired truck driver said a data center is being built near her home and she’s trying to learn more.
“I love that. That (Ramaswamy) is holding (data centers) accountable to bring their own water. To bring their own electric. … And no tax abatement for them,” Wise said, adding that she was able to chat with Ramaswamy after the event.
She said she has seen video clips of Ramaswamy in the past.
“He’s so common sense. And we’re missing common sense,” Wise said.
“He can talk in a way that we all understand. He’s not one of them that even though he has the brain and the IQ, he doesn’t talk that way. He puts it in layman’s terms where we can understand it. And it makes us comfortable. He gives you that sense of a warm hug with his words because he’s talking at our level with us, not at us.”
Reach Robert at robert.wang@cantonrep.com.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Ramaswamy talks data center bans, Medicare fraud during NE Ohio stop
Reporting by Robert Wang, Canton Repository / The Repository
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Robert Wang, Canton Repository | USA TODAY Network
