There are lots of losers in

-- a piece of junk disguised as a two-year spending plan.

The biggest victims, naturally, are the people of Ohio.

They're the ones betrayed by a Republican-run legislature that thinks it's far more important to protect oil companies than to provide health care for the poor.

Sometime in the last 210 years, the state has probably had a legislature worse than this one, but there can't be too many more dreadful than the 130th Ohio General Assembly.

But don't think Gov. John Kasich walks away from this budget process unscathed. Anyone who views the end product as anything less than a defeat for the governor is delusional.

The budget Kasich sent to the legislature in early February had seven big asks:

• A 20 percent cut in the state income tax rate.

• Accepting federal Medicaid money to provide health care for the poor.

• A broad expansion of goods and services subject to the sales tax.

• A huge tax cut for small businesses.

• Dramatic changes to the school funding formula.

• A tiny new tax on the process that captures gas and oil known as fracking.

• Higher-education reform.

The legislature denied him six of those seven, giving Kasich only the higher-education piece.

Kasich's 1-for-7 batting average is especially notable, considering 60 of 99 House members and 23 of 33 in the Senate are members of his political party.

But maybe that's what Kasich deserves for thinking until the bitter end that House Speaker Bill Batchelder and Senate President Keith Faber eventually would do the right thing -- especially on Medicaid expansion.

Way back on April 14, I wrote that Batchelder had "played Team Kasich for fools" on Medicaid.

How someone as smart and experienced as Kasich allowed himself to be snookered by the speaker for nearly six months is astonishing.

The new budget cuts some taxes by about $1.7 billion and raises others by about $1.1 billion. The centerpiece pays for a modest income tax cut with the help of a modest sales tax increase.

What a great idea! Increase a regressive tax to pay for a cut in the progressive one. My 6-year-old grandson could devise a more creative spending plan.

The legislature gives Kasich 14.3 percent of his major requests and the governor claims victory.

You can't make this stuff up.

Kasich's focus on Ohio's economy is refreshingly relentless. And that economy has gotten better on his watch.

But it hasn't improved as much as Kasich wants us to believe.

U.S. Labor Department figures released June 20 showed that Ohio added a robust 32,100 jobs in May. Since Kasich became governor in January 2011, the state has added nearly 180,000 jobs.

But most of that job growth came in the first 18 months of Kasich's term.

Ohio now has gone 11 straight months with job growth below the national average.

And Labor Department data released in May showed that while gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States grew by 2.5 percent in 2012, in Ohio it increased by only 2.2 percent.

GDP is a key measure of economic growth based on the total value of all goods and services produced. The Dayton Daily News reported that since 1997 Ohio's economy has grown faster than the nation's only twice -- in 2002 and 2011.

"Ohio is recovering, but the rate of the recovery is way too slow," said respected Cleveland economist George Zeller.

Ned Hill, dean of the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, said Ohio's economy is experiencing a "rough patch." "Coming out of the recession, we led the recovery because of the auto industry," said Hill. "But we are also one of the most export-exposed states in the nation. So when you have Europe going into recession and China slowing down, that affects us."

Ohio's abundance of shale oil and gas makes Hill "pretty bullish" about the state's economy over the long term. And he described Kasich's proposed tax on the oil and gas industry as "the act of an economic grown-up."

The folks in charge of Ohio's legislature might be old enough to carry concealed weapons, but that doesn't make them grown-ups.

They gave the oil and gas producers a free pass.

And they imposed a fiscal penalty on families that vote to raise their property taxes because they want a better life for their school-age children.

All this, said Batchelder, is part of a plan to make Ohio "the greatest location in the nation."

It's more likely to make clear-thinking Ohioans sick to their stomach.