Tight Times, Tough Choices Redux: Pennsylvania Edition
April 30, 2009
Dan Pohlig, WHYY/It's Our City
When times get loose again, can we have another one of these shows to talk about how we are going to make easy choices?
And that's a wrap.
Just wrapped up the taping of the Tight Times, Tough Choices television program but not without a few choice moments among our panelists. Secretary Cooper offered some perspective when she informed the assembled audience that Pennsylvania's personal income tax is the lowest among all states that have such a tax to which Senator Corman replied that he does not think that Pennsylvanians are undertaxed. Corman soundbite answer plays much better than Cooper's recitation of statistics but ignores the fact that her point was not that Pennsylvanians are undertaxed (which agreed with Corman was not the case) but that the state government of the 6th largest state in the country is asked to do a lot of things with a very thin revenue base.
State Rep. Evans brought the discussion back to "values," specifically the values that are reflected in a state budget. After a promising start, he took the audience on one of his characteristic rhetorical roller coasters, managing to make references to everything from the Little League World Series to swine flu. Evans works in soundbites like Jackson Pollock worked in paint.
Oddly enough it was Senator Casey who worked in several of the night's lighter moments - not difficult to do when you have absolutely no responsibility over the state budget and are sitting in a studio in Washington DC. In answer to one of Nell Abom's questions in which she pointed out that had he not lost his bid for governor in 2002, he would be the one making these tough choices, Casey deadpanned, "Nell, you did state the record accurately when you said I lost the race for governor."
He followed that with some platitudes about the rest of the assembled panel and his confidence that together they would work things out. He then broke out his guitar and led a rousing rendition of Kumbaya.
But seriously folks... at the prompting of Evans, Casey recalled a quote that his father, the former governor, used to borrow from Hubert Humphrey - Government is judged by how it treats its citizens who are in the dawn of life, the shadows of life and the twilight of life. The state budget, he said, is about those values.
We just came out of the first break in the taping of the Tight Times, Tough Choices television program with Senator Casey, St. Sen. Corman, St. Rep. Evans and Sec. Donna Cooper, hosted by Nell McCormack Abom, who I'm learning is a bulldog when it comes to interviewing.
St. Sen. Corman is representing the Republican caucus in the state House and Senate and Abom has been grilling him on the budget alternative that the Republicans will be unveiling tomorrow. Apparently, the state GOP wants to cut another $1.5 billion beyond the cuts that Governor Rendell has proposed. Abom pressed Corman about where those cuts would come from considering that Rendell's budget is eliminating over 100 programs. Corman finally came around to admitting that perhaps much of it will come from education funding with the understanding that the extra money that school are getting from the federal stimulus will balance things out.
Secretary Donna Cooper mentioned that the Governor Rendell proposes tapping into the rainy day fund, which currently stands at $750 million. Corman replied that with the federal stimulus money coming in, the state shouldn't tap into that $750 million and leave it for a time when it is raining even harder than it is now. Apparently we should be calling it the category 5 hurricane fund.
Evans jumped in and brought up "cost shifting" whereby additional cuts to the state levels of education would simply shift the burden to local property owners and cuts to health care would put pressure on charities to step in.
Corman's proposal to leave the rainy day fund in tact, cut spending and use the stimulus mostly to fill in some gaps rather than expand buying power reminds me of a classic Krugman column about the problems posed by the 50 Herbert Hoovers - state governments that cut state funding even as the federal government tries to stimulate the economy.
Your fellow citizens' ideas are going to be on a television near you!
Is there a governmental body that isn't experiencing "tight times" these days? Heck, is there a household or corporation that hasn't had to cut back?
Everywhere you turn, there's more news about layoffs, program cuts, loss of funding, unemployment, bankruptcy and just pure budgetary chaos. The government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania isn't immune to these troubles.
But unlike, say, municipal or local budgets which affect people directly with their trash collection, local libraries or recreation centers, or the federal budget which is huge to the point of ridiculousness but gets a decent amount of coverage in the news, no one really knows how the budgetary sausage gets made in Harrisburg. Tonight about 100 people have gathered to learn a little about the budget, talk through the "tough choices" and grill some state officials about what's going on with their state tax dollars.
Steve Wray of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia took everyone through a Pennsylvania Budget Primer which in 15 minutes taught me more about the state budget than ALL of the combined coverage that I've read in the papers. (Did you know that education funding totals 41.4 percent of 2009-10 general fund spending?)
Now the people are literally surrounding me, broken down in small groups that are meeting in various nooks and crannies of WHYY's offices. One lucky group even got to take over the workspace of Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane:
Oh my gosh, Marty Moss-Coane sits at this table!!!
A conversation to my left is going on about the funding that the state spends on incarceration. To my right, another group is wondering whether the state is going to take over responsibility for funding programs in PA cities that should be getting help directly from the federal government (and fearing what will happen to Philadelphia when Ed Rendell goes off to be NFL Commissioner).
In a few minutes, the groups will reassemble as one large group and using what they've learned in their breakout sessions, they will put U.S. Sen. Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA); State Sen. Jake Corman (R-Centre); State Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Philadelphia); and Donna Cooper, State Secretary of Policy and Planning through their paces on the state budget.
http://whyy.org/blogs/itsourcity/2009/04/30/tight-times-tough-choices-r…