Budget Secretary Charles Zogby said that it’s up to members
of the Pennsylvania General Assembly to find funding within the Governor’s
proposed budget to restore the administration’s proposed severe cuts to basic
and higher education. As Zogby laid it out on Sunday’s edition of Pennsylvania Newsmakers,
the Pennsylvania budget is a zero sum game where funding one program comes at
the expense of another one.
But here’s an idea – ease the pain by raising new revenues.
Last week Maryland enacted a 7.5 percent severance tax on natural gas
production. In contrast, the impact fee passed by Pennsylvania in February has
an effective tax rate of only 1.4 to 2.6 percent depending on the price of gas.
The members of the General Assembly who voted for the bill walked away from gas
driller money, and now will need to figure out how to get adequate funding to
their school districts. According to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy
Center’s drilling tax ticker, Commonwealth taxpayers have lost out on more
than $300 million since 2009.
Corbett’s budget cuts are hurting our communities. The
administration’s fealty to no-new-taxes ideology is leading to deterioration of
the quality of education as teachers lose their jobs, class sizes increase and
core programs are eliminated. Hardly any school district, no matter how well
off, has been spared. The Central Dauphin School District in the suburbs of
Harrisburg is
planning to lay off 74 teachers, cut foreign language classes for 8th
graders, and take away art, music, physical education and the library from
kindergarten.
According to the anti-tax ideology, taking away crayons and
tambourine bands from 5-year-olds is necessary to grow Pennsylvania’s economy
out of the recession and create jobs. But that’s not what is happening. An analysis
of job creation published by “The Nation” magazine shows that the worse job
losses in the country are concentrated in states where Republicans won the
governorship from Democrats and gained control of both chambers of the state
legislature. Five of these states, Pennsylvania among them, lost 2.5 percent of
their workforces between December 2010 and December 2011 as compared to other
states which on average lost only half a percent of their workforces.
Laying off teachers and state and local government workers
is no way to grow an economy out of a recession. Investing in education,
transportation infrastructure and maintaining vital services is not wasteful
spending, it’s necessary to maintaining the economic integrity of our
communities. There are sources of new revenue that could be tapped, like a
reasonable drilling tax, to boost our economy and save and create jobs.
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