A good rule of thumb in politics: when a billionaire pushes a tax cut, look closely at who actually gets the money. More often than not, it's the billionaire.

That's exactly what's happening in Ohio. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican running for governor, wants to get rid of the state's tax on capital gains — the money people make when they sell stocks and other investments. He says it'll grow the economy. But when you do the math on his own tax returns, the picture gets a lot less flattering. This plan would save Ramaswamy himself somewhere around $5.8 million. And it would do it by draining hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of Ohio's schools, hospitals, and basic services.

What a capital gains tax actually is

Most working people earn money from a paycheck. You do a job, you get paid, and the state takes a small cut in income tax. A capital gains tax works the same way — except it's on money you make from selling investments, like stocks.

Here's the catch: the people with huge piles of stock to sell are almost never the people working a regular job. They're the wealthiest people in the state. So when you erase the tax on selling investments, you're handing the biggest checks to the folks who already have the most.

We don't have to guess how this would shake out in Ohio. The nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission — the state's own number-crunchers — looked at the plan and found that 81.6% of the benefit would go to Ohioans making more than $200,000 a year. People earning under $100,000 — which is most of the state — would split just 7.3% of it.

That's not an economy-wide tax cut. That's a giveaway to the top, dressed up as one.

How it pays Ramaswamy millions

Now here's the part that should make every Ohioan sit up.

Ramaswamy isn't just any rich guy. He's worth an estimated $1.8 billion. And the tax returns he released during his 2024 presidential run show exactly the kind of income his plan is built to protect. Across two years, those returns reported roughly $211 million in capital gains — $37 million in 2015 and $174.5 million in 2020, the latter tied to selling off stakes in his drug company Roivant to Japan's Sumitomo.

Apply Ohio's current rate to those gains and Ramaswamy personally would have pocketed about $5.8 million in tax savings under his own proposal. And it's not ancient history, either. His 2025 financial disclosure, filed in April with the Ohio Ethics Commission, reported more than $1.1 million in dividends and capital gains — including $768,968 from a single sale of BlackBerry stock.

This is a candidate writing a tax policy that, by the numbers, pays him more than almost anyone else in Ohio. When the person proposing a law is also one of its single biggest beneficiaries, that's not a coincidence. That's the whole point.

What Ohio loses

Tax cuts aren't free. That money pays for things — and when it's gone, somebody has to make up the difference or do without.

The Legislative Service Commission estimated that repealing the capital gains tax would cost Ohio between $615 million and $645.6 million in 2027 alone — and even more the year after, climbing toward $680 million. That's revenue that helps fund public schools, Medicaid, and the everyday services Ohio families count on.

So where does that missing money come from? One of two places. Either Ohio cuts services — fewer dollars for classrooms, health care, and public safety — or it raises other taxes that fall harder on regular people, like sales taxes. Either way, working families end up holding the bag so that the wealthiest Ohioans can keep more of their investment income.

Ramaswamy waves this off. He told News 5 Cleveland that the state "doesn't even... derive that much revenue from it," calling the repeal "the first step to eventually get to zero income taxation." But $645 million isn't pocket change — it's roughly the cost of running entire state programs. Telling Ohioans it barely matters is how you get them to stop paying attention to the bill that's coming.

A pattern, not a one-off

This isn't the first time Ramaswamy has used his fortune to get what he wants in this race.

He's already written himself a $25 million check to fund his own campaign — the largest self-funding of a governor's race in Ohio history, making up about 83% of the money he raised in 2026. He can do that because he's a billionaire. Now he wants the policy to match the lifestyle: a tax code where people exactly like him pay less, and everyone else covers the gap.

It fits a record we've documented before. Ramaswamy called Medicaid "permanent welfare" and pushed work requirements that would cut 254,000 Ohioans off their health coverage. He helped build DOGE, which shut down more than a dozen federal offices in Ohio. Over and over, the story is the same: take something away from ordinary Ohioans, and protect the people at the very top.

The capital gains plan is just the most direct version of it yet — because this time, the person cashing the biggest check is the candidate himself.

The bottom line

Strip away the talk about "growth" and "entrepreneurs," and here's what's left. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to erase a tax that mostly the wealthy pay. The math says he'd personally save around $5.8 million. The state would lose more than $600 million a year — money that funds schools, Medicaid, and basic services. And more than four out of every five dollars in savings would land in the pockets of people making over $200,000.

That's not a plan to help Ohio. It's a plan to help Vivek Ramaswamy, paid for by everyone else. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by TiffinOhio.net, "Ramaswamy wants to end Ohio's capital gains tax, benefiting wealthy residents—and himself," and a report from the Ohio Democratic Party.