A married couple in Tiffin with two kids and a $60,000 household income would get $1,778 back each year under the tax plan Amy Acton is running on — the centerpiece of an affordability agenda the Democratic nominee for governor is carrying into her November matchup with Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.
Acton, the former Ohio Department of Health director who led the state’s early COVID-19 response, released the plan — branded the “ActOn Lowering Costs” agenda — on Monday, April 6, at a roundtable with small business owners at a Columbus coffeehouse. The $1,778 figure is the campaign’s own estimate for a family of four at that income, but the tools behind it — a refundable earned income credit and a child tax credit — have an independent research record in Ohio, and one of them was proposed in nearly identical form by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine before lawmakers in his own party stripped it from the state budget.
“As governor, my number one priority will be lowering costs for working families,” Acton said at the rollout, according to the Statehouse News Bureau.
How the Working Families Tax Cut would work
The plan’s first piece is a refundable state earned income credit, which the campaign estimates would support up to 775,000 working families. Ohio already has an earned income credit set at 30% of the federal version — but it is nonrefundable, meaning families with little or no state income tax liability never see its full value. A refundable credit pays out the difference in cash, reaching the lowest-paid workers the current credit leaves behind.
That distinction is not a partisan talking point. Research from Policy Matters Ohio, citing modeling by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, found that even a modest 10% refundable state EITC would reach an estimated 1.75 million Ohioans, including 670,000 children. The federal version of the credit lifted roughly 5.3 million Americans above the poverty line in 2021, and 26 states plus the District of Columbia already offer refundable state versions. Ohio is one of only a handful of states with a credit that is not refundable.
The second piece is a child tax credit: $1,000 per year for each child aged 0 to 6 and $500 per year for each child aged 7 to 18, for families earning up to $85,000. The campaign says it would reach more than 1.4 million Ohio children. The structure closely tracks the Thriving Families Tax Credit that Ohio lawmakers have already introduced as House Bill 290, with Acton’s version extending eligibility to higher ages and incomes. An analysis of that similar proposal by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimated it would cut Ohio’s child poverty rate by about 16%, moving roughly 48,000 children out of poverty.
The idea has crossed party lines before. DeWine, a Republican, proposed a $1,000 refundable child tax credit for children under 7 in his 2025 budget. The Republican-controlled Ohio House removed it before passage.
Healthcare: drug prices, medical debt, and Medicaid
The agenda’s healthcare plank cites campaign figures that more than 120,000 Ohioans have dropped Affordable Care Act coverage since 2025 and that 11 rural hospitals in the state are at risk of closure.
Acton proposes launching “Ohio Rx,” an online platform that would use the state’s purchasing power through its Medicaid single pharmacy benefit manager to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for all Ohioans, not just Medicaid enrollees. She would also require that out-of-pocket spending on medications and healthcare supplies count toward insurance deductibles.
On medical debt, Acton pledges to direct the state on her first day in office to join Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Toledo, which the campaign says have relieved nearly $1 billion in medical debt for residents by purchasing it for pennies on the dollar. The plan also calls for cracking down on surprise billing and aggressive collections, expanding hospital and insurance price transparency, and cutting Medicaid red tape and approval wait times.
Undoing HB 6: energy bills and the bailout’s long shadow
The energy section reaches directly into the fallout from House Bill 6, the 2019 utility bailout law at the center of the largest public corruption scandal in Ohio history — the scheme that sent former House Speaker Larry Householder to federal prison for 20 years. Beyond the bribery, HB 6 carried a quieter cost for ratepayers: it eliminated the energy efficiency, demand response, and renewable portfolio standard programs that gave households and small businesses tools to cut their usage and their bills.
Acton pledges to reinstate those programs. She also says she would appoint Public Utilities Commission of Ohio members who are “not beholden to utility companies” and work with the attorney general to restore funding to the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the state’s ratepayer advocate, whose budget has been cut even as utility rate cases have multiplied.
The plan sets out cost guardrails for data centers — requiring the projects and their investors, not taxpayers and surrounding communities, to cover the additional electricity, gas, water, and environmental costs they generate — along with transparency requirements, union labor, and community benefits agreements. Acton also commits Ohio to working with the 12 other states in the PJM regional grid to push for lower power costs. In the plan, Acton writes that she and her husband, Eric, saw their own electric bill jump $140 in a single month last summer.
Wage theft, junk fees, and scams
The consumer protection plank includes a first-day executive order requiring rapid turnaround on wage theft cases; the campaign says more than 213,000 Ohio workers are shorted through unpaid overtime, sub-minimum wages, stolen tips, and misclassification as independent contractors. Acton backs House Bill 563, sponsored by state Rep. Mark Hiner, a Republican from Howard, which would require ticket sellers and online marketplaces to show the full cost of a ticket — fees included — up front, and pairs it with a “First Click Guarantee” that the first price a buyer sees is the price they pay. The plan also proposes a price-gouging hotline, anti-scam protections for seniors, a modernized SNAP EBT system to prevent benefit theft, and parental controls on in-app purchases.
Two tax plans, two theories of who gets help
Neither candidate has fully explained how the state would absorb the cost of their tax promises. The Statehouse News Bureau reported that Acton offered few funding specifics at her rollout, and Ohio Republicans have launched a website claiming her agenda would add $21 billion in spending and require doubling the state income tax — a partisan estimate the campaign disputes. Ramaswamy spokeswoman Connie Luck said the agenda means “billions in new spending, higher taxes and bigger government.”
But the same question hangs over Ramaswamy’s side of the ledger, at a much larger scale. His signature proposal is phasing out Ohio’s income tax, which brought in more than $10 billion last fiscal year — roughly a quarter of the state’s operating budget — and he has not specified which programs he would cut to cover it. As TiffinOhio.net reported last week, Legislative Service Commission analysis of the related capital gains repeal found 81.6% of its benefit would flow to Ohioans earning more than $200,000 a year, while those making under $100,000 would receive 7.3%.
That is the contrast likely to define the affordability debate this fall: Acton’s credits are capped at $85,000 in household income and aimed at the bottom and middle of the wage scale; Ramaswamy’s cuts deliver their largest gains at the top. Acton, for her part, has called Ramaswamy’s leadership a danger to Ohio, and Democrats say his tax plan would blow a $10 billion hole in the state budget.
Acton, who was unopposed in the May 5 Democratic primary, is running with former Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper as her lieutenant governor candidate. Ramaswamy won the Republican primary with more than 82% of the vote. The general election is November 3.
