State Budget and Taxes

What Would an Adequate Pennsylvania Budget Look Like This Year?

Posted by Marc Stier on June 15, 2017 5:55 pm
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What Would an Adequate Pennsylvania Budget Look Like This Year? 

A really good budget for Pennsylvania would begin addressing our long-term public investment deficit. It would provide new funds to: 

  • eliminate our worst-in-the-nation inequality in K-12 school funding; 
  • expand pre-K education to all three and four year-olds;
  • make higher education more accessable, especially to students from low-income families;
  • restore the funding that would allow the Department of Environment to better protect our air and water;
  • provide new funding to repair roads and bridges and support public transit.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Posted by Marc Stier on June 8, 2017 9:34 am
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Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas in 2010, just as Tom Corbett became governor of Pennsylvania. Brownback and Corbett, with the help of Republican majorities in their legislatures, embarked on an extremist Wizard of Oz economic agenda of cutting taxes, especially for large businesses, and reducing spending on education and human services. Spending as a share of the state’s economy dropped by 10% in our state.
 
Faced with slow economic growth, stark budget deficits, and citizens who were demanding better public services, a bi-partisan majority in the legislature in Kansas this week stood up for common sense against Wizard of Oz extremism and, over Brownback’s veto, rolled back many of those tax cuts.
 
Is this the year that state legislators in Pennsylvania also embrace common sense and reject extremism?
 

Attacks on Public Sector Workers Hurt Working People and Benefit the Rich

Posted by Stephen Herzenberg on April 22, 2017 1:47 pm
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Republican lawmakers in the Pennsylvania House and Senate continue to promote bills that would reduce the power of public sector unions by undercutting them financially. These bills would make it harder or illegal to collect some current contributions to unions (e.g., from non-members who enjoy higher wages and benefits and workplace representation from public sector unions).

House GOP Budget Unites Pennsylvanians Across the Political Spectrum ... in CONDEMNING It

Posted by Jeff Garis on April 11, 2017 6:25 pm
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House Bill 218, the unbalanced, cuts-only budget that House Republican leaders fast-tracked through the lower chamber in a near party-line vote last week, has provoked plenty of criticism. Not surprisingly, Democratic legislators decried the many cuts that accompany a budget that reduces total expenditures by 1% over the current fiscal year.

Guest Blogger: We Must Have Missed the Memo

Posted by Guest Blogger on April 10, 2017 11:55 am
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by Jin David Kim, Communications Director, PCCY

Some state representatives, siding with the research and the will of the people they represent, have boarded the quality pre-k train only to threaten to derail it in this, the first week of PA’s budget process.

The (Wholly Inadequate) GOP Budget Proposal (HB 218)

Posted by Marc Stier on April 6, 2017 2:34 pm
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The House Republican Budget proposal for 2017-2017 is deeply problematic in six respects. 

First, the proposal does not close the state’s budget deficit, but leaves a gap of close to $800 million. Most of the revenue ideas presented by the House Republican Caucus to fill that gap are similar to the one-time revenues and fund transfers that have failed to fix our structural deficit in the past. The Republicans do not seem to be considering any proposal to increase recurring revenues by fixing our upside-down tax system.

The Obamacare repeal is a state budget time bomb

Posted by John Neurohr on January 26, 2017 4:23 pm
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This piece originally ran in Pennlive on January 26, 2017.

You think Pennsylvania has budget problems now? Wait until the Affordable Care Act is gone. 

That's probably a parochial, Harrisburg-centric way of looking at the consequences of repealing Obamacare.

The ACA has benefited Pennsylvanians in so many ways that its eventual repeal will be terribly painful.

We recently released a report that shows that 1.1 million Pennsylvanians will lose insurance and additional 3,250 deaths will occur each year as a result.

How did the Pennsylvania Labor Market Perform in 2016

Last Friday, The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry released preliminary estimates of December payrolls which show Pennsylvania created 32,000 jobs in the last 12 months. Payroll growth was especially weak in the 2nd half of 2016, which is likely one reason state revenue collections through December are $300 million below projections. Despite this weakness, payrolls still grew more in 2016 than they did in 2012 and 2013 when deep budget cuts weighed on job growth in Pennsylvania.

The State and Local Government Workforce in Pennsylvania is the 2nd Smallest in the Country

Posted by Mark Price on January 11, 2017 1:26 pm
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As we begin to debate the 2017-18 state budget, the anti-government spin merchants will (yet again) paint a picture of a menacing, out-of-control public sector in Pennsylvania eating up taxpayers like a great Kraken.

But facts do matter. And the picture they will paint is the opposite of the true picture, shown above. 

OP-ED: Combine spending restraint with new revenue

Posted by Marc Stier on January 5, 2017 11:05 am
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This piece originally appeared in the Erie Times-News, December 28, 2016.

Pennsylvania has been struggling with persistent budget deficits since the start of the Great Recession in 2008. And we at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center have been recommending a "balanced approach" to resolving the deficit from the beginning, one that combines restraint in spending with new revenues.

But since 2010, under Govs. Tom Corbett and Tom Wolf, the General Assembly has adopted an unbalanced approach. Spending has gone down but revenues have gone down faster. From 1994 to 2011, under both Democratic and Republican governors, the state spent 4.7 percent of the state's gross domestic product. During the Corbett years that fell to 4.3 percent as spending on education and human services were sharply cut. And while, thanks to Wolf, the state has been able to restore some of those cuts, spending in the last two years remains at the same level as in the Corbett years.

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