Firing blanks
The Penn Center for Public Policy and Citizens Against Higher Taxes rolled out the big guns last week by asking state lawmakers to sign a pledge between now and Sept. 9 to promise they won’t support Gov. Ed. Rendell’s proposed 34 percent increase in the state’s personal income tax. However, they’re firing at a position that already has been abandoned.
The Associated Press reports Rendell has said more recently he’s willing to consider a smaller increase, so the hike is not etched in stone.
And he’s unlikely to get even that. House Majority Leader John Perzel, R-Philadelphia, has made it quite clear that Republicans, who control the House, aren’t buying Rendell’s tax hike plan. Where Rendell wants a statewide solution, House Republicans are thinking local.
Nor does Perzel see the need to increase state funding of public education. He thinks the state already is spending more than enough money and that Rendell’s effort to convince Pennsylvania residents that there is an education crisis “is simply not true.”
Perzel is speaking only for the House, which at least is reading the same book as Rendell.
The Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans, isn’t even in the same library.
Want more? Democratic lawmakers aren’t backing Rendell’s income tax proposal, even though it would reduce school district property taxes statewide. That’s why they’re such big supporters of expanding legalized gambling in the commonwealth. (The Senate’s version of the gambling bill would not have passed if not for the unanimous support of the Democrats.)
To complicate the matter even more, the Senate’s education funding plan for this fiscal year isn’t in sync with the House’s.
Leaders in the House and Senate and the governor still must hammer out their differences.
Given the iron discipline of the caucuses in Harrisburg, especially the GOP’s, the politically and ideologically incompatible approaches to addressing tax modernization, and the strong personalities and egos involved, one has to wonder why the anti-taxers were wasting their ammunition.
This battle has been over for months.