Issue Position: The Pennsylvania Budget

Issue Position

After four years of on-time budgets that held the line on personal income taxes, the Wolf administration is holding our school children hostage in his campaign to raise the income tax and expand the sales tax to new items.

I am flat-out opposed to any tax increases. Fifteen years ago, the state budget was $20 billion. This year, it will pass the $30 billion mark. Even with inflation factored in, I doubt the incomes of Pennsylvania's working families have gone up by 50 percent in that time. We don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. And you don't cure a spending problem by spending more.

The general assembly twice sent Gov. Wolf balanced budgets that included hundreds of millions of dollars for public schools. The governor's response was to veto the budget, and then veto the stopgap spending bill. On the third time around, with schools on the verge of closing, he issued a line-item veto designed to allow school funds to run out before years end, so he could force the general assembly to pass an 11 percent increase in the income tax.

It took nine months and multiple tries before House members split from the party line and pushed a budget through to passage.

Nobody I know received an 11 percent salary increase in the past year. This is just another case of a tax-and-spend liberal digging deep into other people's pockets to reward the special interests that elected him.

There is simply a time we have to say "no" to tax increases and this is one of them. Right now, government employees are living better than most of the people they tax to pay for their perks and privileges.

No tax increase.

Source