Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Rural schools. The Columbus Dispatch’s Cole Behrens reports, “Rural Ohio schools face budget crises as districts strain to cut costs.”

(R)ural districts across the state say they are feeling the pinch amid rising costs, property tax reform and a lack of state aid they say challenges their ability to offer an education that is often the backbone of their communities…

The Dispatch reported in May that over 120 Ohio public school districts are projecting negative cash balances by 2029, the worst rate since the Great Recession. Statewide, districts from the largest urban schools to the smallest rural ones are facing budgetary constraints leading to job cuts and service reductions.

• Crypto money. TiffinOhio.net’s Dave Miller reports, “Trump crypto founders bankrolled Ramaswamy as he pushes to invest Ohio public funds in Bitcoin.”

In the seven weeks after Vivek Ramaswamy won Ohio’s Republican primary for governor, his campaign collected the legal maximum donation — $16,615 apiece — from a tight circle of people with one thing in common: they built the cryptocurrency company that has made the family of President Donald Trump more than a billion dollars…

The donations land at a precise intersection of money and policy. Ramaswamy has said he wants to be “the strongest pro-Bitcoin governor in the nation,” has personally held Bitcoin and Ethereum, and co-founded a company that has bet roughly a billion dollars of its corporate treasury on Bitcoin. The crypto industry’s most politically connected operators — some of them under federal scrutiny in Washington — were writing him maximum checks as he locked up the nomination to run a state he has promised to turn into a haven for their industry.

• Healthcare unaffordable for most Americans. ABC News reports, “Fewer than half of Americans say they can afford healthcare: Gallup.”

Fewer than 49% of Americans can afford healthcare, the lowest rate since tracking began in 2021, according to Gallup data released Thursday.

In a single year, roughly 2.8 million people no longer identified as being “Cost Secure” meaning they could no longer afford access to quality care or pay for visits and prescriptions, according to the data. Worry about future healthcare costs, including visits and prescriptions, amongst Americans is also at an all-time high of over 40%, according to Gallup.

• A nation in decline. The New Republic reports, “Trump’s Unnerving Mental Breakdown Signals Nation in Decline.”

Economist Paul Krugman discusses all the ways Trump is causing our country to deteriorate—and what it means that we put up with his worsening megalomania and desecrations of our republic…

Sargent: Indeed. You had this video where you went very big picture, assessing where we really are right now. I want to try to summarize your argument briefly. Basically it’s that the United States is no longer seen by our allies and much of the world as an indispensable nation. Our military can’t do what we thought it could—can’t force smaller countries like Iran to do our bidding, or Trump’s bidding. That due to Trump’s tariff fiascos, we have less leverage in trade wars than we thought. That China has unexpected leverage over supply chains and important goods and important resources. That in part due to our abandonment of Ukraine, our onetime allies are looking past us to a post-American world. Et cetera. Is that the basic argument?

Krugman: That’s the basic argument. Even things that I find somewhat encouraging, like the fact that Ukraine is holding despite Trump having cut them off completely—the United States just stopped sending money and basically stopped the flow of arms, we won’t even allow the Europeans to buy arms for Ukraine—and yet Ukraine seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is telling you that they don’t need us. The world doesn’t need us.

That’s part of what’s happened in Iran as well. It turns out that if there was one thing we thought America really had, it was the world’s greatest military and the world’s best weapons, and nobody else could manage without us. And it turns out that we were completely flat-footed in the face of Iranian drones and that Ukraine is holding its own without American weapons.

So who are we? We’re becoming bystanders in world events. America is a rogue power, it does crazy things, it can’t even impose its will on a third-rate military power like Iran, and we don’t seem to actually be necessary for the defense of Europe. We’re a kind of shadow of our former selves on the world stage.

Sargent: Is this inexorable decline, do you think? Can it be turned around

Krugman: Some of it is probably irreversible, and some of it would have happened anyway. To a large extent, America as it seemed to be as Trump took office was an outmoded vision. We didn’t fully understand that. But there was still a reflexive tendency on much of the world to think, You have to accommodate, you have to give in, allow yourself to be bullied by an American president no matter what. The truth is the fundamentals had already shifted against the United States in the global power game.

But there’s a lot that has obviously been made much worse by Trump screwups. What the world now has to suspect, even when Trump is gone from the stage, is who’s the next guy? How do we know that we won’t have another Trump-like figure? Does an agreement with America mean anything, since we’ve just seen an American president rip up every agreement that we had? Does a threat from America mean anything, because we’ve just seen that same guy cave totally? After all, this guy was—sorry to say—elected fairly by the American people. What does that say about America?
AWe don’t get that back. It took generations to build the reputation of America. You don’t get that back unless you give us three generations of good governance from here on in.