Don’t turn Pennsylvania into Texas
Introducing his first budget last week, Gov. Tom Corbett proposed gutting state funding for education while sparing natural gas drillers from the type of production tax imposed by all other major gas-producing states. Corbett argued that a gas industry unencumbered by a production tax would turn Pennsylvania into “the Texas of the natural gas boom.”
Well, there already is a “Texas of the natural gas boom.”
It’s called Texas.
And despite a longstanding, but loophole-ridden, 7.5 percent production tax on the nation’s most productive gas wells, Texas, like most states, is faced with a huge budget deficit.
In fact, a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that Texas’ projected budget gap for fiscal year 2012 is the largest in the nation when measured against its current budget, at 31.5 percent.
Unlike his fellow Republican budget-cutters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where projected budget shortfalls stand at 16.4 and 12.8 percent respectively, Texas Gov. Rick Perry can’t blame greedy state employee unions or out-of-control social spending for his money woes.
State employees in Texas have long been barred from collective bargaining and the state is notoriously stingy when it comes to spending on schools and social programs.
A 2009 study by the National Education Association found Texas ranked near the bottom for per-capita spending for public welfare programs and per-student expenditures in public schools. Nearly one-quarter of Texans lack health coverage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to about 10 percent in Pennsylvania and 15 percent nationwide.
That still hasn’t helped Texas escape the downturn in tax revenues ravaging all states, due largely to a weakened economy that seems to just now be on the road to recovery.
In fact the very refusal by uber-conservatives like Perry – who has proposed that his state opt out of the Social Security system and maybe the Union itself – to even consider reasonable and fair tax increases over the years is what has driven Texas closer to the brink than any other state.
That’s the road Tom Corbett is proposing we follow in his proposed budget.
He would rather take money and services away from public-school students, the poor and elderly than impose a fair tax on the gas industry, which, by the way, contributed nearly $1 million to his campaign.
Corbett’s proposed budget is unfair, unconscionable and unethical.
And it is likely to land us in the same mess as Texas.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/don-t-turn-pennsylvania-into-texas-1.1117896#axzz1GJB7bAaK
March 13, 2011