By Dick Miller
WE.CONNECT.DOTS: Sunday, November 15, 2015 – For new Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf the very tentative 2015-16 state government budget agreement reached last week is not such a good start.
The warring sides in Harrisburg both claimed mandates after last year’s election. Wolf, using personal funds, made sure Republican incumbent Tom Corbett became the first governor to fail to win a second term.
Republicans, however, solidified control of the legislature, winning eight more House seats. In the Senate, the GOP not only added three more to their total then, but also won a special election earlier this month. Republican margin in that section of the General Assembly is now 31-19.
Preliminary look at this budget – five months late, by the way – is that Republican lawmakers have more to crow about than Gov. Wolf does.
The GOP clearly wins the battle of taxes.
Wolf has tentatively agreed to a hike in sales tax from 6.0 to 7.25 percent, said to generate about $2 billion, said to apply to local property tax cuts. Before property owners begin celebrating, know this.
About $600 million of the sales tax increase will replace a like amount of taxes from casinos that already reduced property taxes. Our state leaders will then apply that $600 million to a very feeble effort at pension catch-ups.
The spin is what counts.
GOP lawmakers will not call this a tax increase, claiming rather that the sales tax hike is being used to lower property taxes. Even better for the GOP, an increase in sales tax hits the working poor Democrats. A raise in personal income tax, which would affect Republican high wage earners, was also on the table.
For a Republican with a decent job or profitable business, can it get any better?
While talk centered on concluding budget negotiations by Thanksgiving, think more like Christmas. At best, the two sides will agree on a partial release of funds to school districts and social service agencies in time to prevent a bleaker holiday season.
Gov. Wolf will still claim that this represents a major compromise because two other big tax levies – the increase in personal income taxes and a new tax on natural gas extractions come off the table. Polls show voters favor the extraction tax by a 3-1 margin. People who don’t want the extraction tax, however, write the big campaign checks in Harrisburg.
The state sales tax increase would give us the second largest such levy in the U.S. Pennsylvania would continue, however, to be the only significant producer of untaxed natural gas.
In Pennsylvania, the real battle of the state government budget does not end tomorrow, next week, Christmas or sometime in 2016.
Budget squabbles are a part of business in Harrisburg, reflecting wider philosophical differences as state government moves forward, chronologically if not always functionally.
What makes this budget squabble different from past episodes is the new type of legislators who elected from heavily gerrymandered districts. These “shorter-sighted” lawmakers have less concern for the welfare of the state. They work to appease their individual base of voters who voted them into their plush jobs.
More of these lawmakers are Republican, although extreme applications of gerrymandering blessed by an equally, partisan Supreme Court, squeezes Democrats into equally safe districts . . . just less of them.
Wolf looks at the preceding four years under Gov. Tom Corbett as a period when Republicans ripped the guts from public education. He claims he will bring state funding of local public education back to where it was when Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell left office in 2011.
In his first budget, however, Wolf makes a poor start
Bottom Line: Agreement of a sales tax increase, which further crushes working poor Pennsylvanians, is the most egregious solution. Other parts of this pathetic effort, passing for a new state budget, are equally complex and create more problems than they solve.
The Republican leadership pat themselves on the back for the efficient manner in which they applied gerrymandering to the current census numbers and locations. Now extremists are beginning to dictate to that leadership.
Our well-meaning Governor is short on political skills. The ingredients are there for continued chaos in our state capital.
Keep in mind, beginning in February the Governor will reveal a new spending blueprint for fiscal 2016-17 and the wrangling begins anew.
When it became evident that Wolf budget and GOP budget were very far apart and no one was moving, time to introduce version 3 of a budget that would be owned by the Democrat legislators. This would have been a document that moderate Republicans could have signed onto, getting us closer to a final version.
The current compromise is a piece of garbage that does not merit the delay of the last five months.
No one down there seems to know what they are doing. I was impressed that Wolf sent then-chief of staff Katie McGinty out to sell the budget. But then there was no follow-up and – very soon – no Kathy McGinty.
I hazard a guess that the compromise budget resembles what a Corbett budget in his fifth year might have looked like. The moderate GOPs had some input in Corbett’s tenure which prevented him and the wingnuts from dismantling the entire state government.