Issue Position: Jobs

Issue Position

Pennsylvania is losing jobs. General Electric is laying off nearly 1,000 people. Joy Manufacturing cut 400 jobs in Franklin. The story is the same across the state, where our 9.9 percent corporate net income tax -- arguably the highest in the nation -- discourages big companies from locating to Pennsylvania. And, among small businesses that file using the state's personal income tax rate, the threat of a retroactive income tax increase is freezing job creators in their tracks.

We need an economic growth policy that respects the role of business, allows working people to keep more of their paychecks, and acknowledges that sometimes government needs to keep out of the way.

One example is the domino-like effect of regulations.

When General Electric announced that it would be laying off nearly 1,000 Erie workers and moving locomotive production to Texas, our current senator said he was keeping in close contact with the company about the situation. What nobody did was connect the dots on how this sort of job loss happens.

The locomotives built at the Erie plant were made, for the most part, to haul coal. [1]Extreme environmental special interests -- including people with investments in government subsidized alternative power companies -- have made it their mission to close down coal powered electrical generating stations.[2] So far, they've pushed 190 plants off-line. The leader in this movement is the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club has been a financial supporter of the incumbent state senator, and endorsed him for election four years ago.[3]

You can't say you're for jobs at the GE Plant in Erie while doing the bidding of the very people who helped to destroy so many of those jobs. You're with the working people, or you're with the crowd that won't rest until the Pennsylvania fuel that produces 40 percent of our electricity is driven from the market.

EPA regulations currently force our manufacturers to ship jobs to China, where companies use coal for power, and then make the products we should be manufacturing on our own soil. The result: American jobs are lost to a place where coal is burned with no regulations at all.

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