What a mess
Legislators fail to tackle problems With this year’s state budget, the Pennsylvania state legislature outed itself as a big fan of humorist Mark Twain. After all, there’s nothing that quite encapsulates the legislature’s latest budget as Twain’s quip about procrastination: “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
That’s because even though our lawmakers in Harrisburg completed what seemed impossible just last year – passing a budget on time – they only managed it by skirting all the tough decisions we elected them to tackle. Instead, they left all the serious and controversial problems unsolved and put off until tomorrow – or the day after.
While we will be thankfully spared the months-long drama of last year when the budget was 101 days late and thousands of state employees were left in furlough limbo, legislators shouldn’t exactly be planning themselves a parade for their efforts this year.
That’s because this budget is notable more for what it doesn’t include than what it does. The scale and sheer number of issues that lawmakers ignored is staggering. If this were how you planned your household budget, you’d have to make sure you didn’t account for your mortgage, car payment, electricity bill, water bill, phone bill – you get the idea.
And while we’ve been vocal before about the serious dysfunction of the state legislature, this time we’re being joined by critics from inside the Capitol. Sen. Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, said what was passed was “another budget where you put off until tomorrow what you are not politically willing to do today” and Rep. Scott Perry, R-York, called it “a shell game rather than a real solution.”
Among the major issues unaddressed or pushed into the future in the 2010-2011 spending plan are:
n A Marcellus shale tax was pushed back until October, which seems like a pipe dream considering politicians are averse to do anything at all risky right before seeking re-election;
n A tobacco tax that would’ve generated about $100 million in revenue and brought the state in line with the rest of the nation in taxing sales of cigars and smokeless tobacco never materialized;
n A solution to the impending crisis over state pensions was not found because the Senate took summer vacation without acting on an imperfect measure passed by the House;
n The $472 million a year that legislators were supposed to find to fix roads, bridges and mass transit across the state remains unfound;
n What the state will do to fill a looming shortfall for continuing programs when federal stimulus money dries up next year.
Beyond the serious issues unaddressed, what the budget does address is based on shaky math. The budget is “balanced” by means of $850 million in federal funds that may never come from Congress and a somewhat preposterous expectation that during a recession state tax revenues will increase by 3.2 percent over the next 12 months.
The latter scheme to parade this as a “balanced budget” is even more galling because, as Rep. Sam Rohrer, R-Reading, put it, “no one with any fiscal sanity is believing that the state or national economy is going to grow by 3 percent” over the next year.
The legislature may have passed this year’s budget on time, but the only thing they can honestly pat themselves on the back about is their prodigious ability to avoid tough decisions. Hard choices need to be made in Harrisburg – unfortunately the only decision our current crop of legislators can make is that they don’t want to be the ones to do it.