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What to Expect When You’re Expecting New Districts

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, Policy reports, Redistricting

Sometime in the next ninety days—and perhaps much sooner—we expect to see the Legislative Redistricting Commission (LRC) release its first draft of a plan for the redistricting of Pennsylvania’s state House and Senate districts. This policy brief aims to give Pennsylvania’s citizens, community leaders, media, and advocates some idea of what to expect from the forthcoming LRC plan. To state our conclusion as succinctly as possible: we expect the LRC to give us fair, nonpartisan legislative districts for the first time in at least two decades. Chairman Mark Nordenberg is leading the effort to undo the effects of twenty years of Republican gerrymandering and create districts that recognize demographic changes over the last decade. As a result, fairly drawn districts lines will look very different than current ones. Click here to print or read full-screen.  Continue reading

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The “Billionaire Tax”: What It Is and Why We Need It

  By Billionaire tax, Federal Taxes, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Taxation, Uncategorized, US

UPDATE: Senator Ron Wyden has released his “Billionaires Income Tax” legislation—read the language of the bill here:  https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Billionaires%20Income%20Tax.pdf. As negotiations between President Biden and House and Senate members over the Build Back Better plan have developed in the last few weeks, a new tax proposal to fund the close to $2 billion investment in health care, child care, paid family leave, climate change, and other programs, has come to the fore: a “billionaire tax.” While Senator Wyden and others have been discussing this proposal for some time, it is a relatively unknown concept and would be a new form of federal taxation. Here we briefly explain what it is and why it is an excellent idea. The new proposal is to tax the increased wealth of the richest Americans each year. The tax would apply immediately to tradeable assets—stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and derivatives—where the value of the asset is… Continue reading

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MEMO: The Corporate Profits Minimum Tax and Why We Need It

  By Corporate Taxes, Federal Taxes, Taxation, US

Democrats are set to introduce a 15% corporate minimum tax as a funding mechanism for the Build Back Better plan. The Corporate Profits Minimum Tax legislation would ensure that roughly 200 corporations that report more than $1 billion in profits to shareholders pay at least a 15% tax rate on those gigantic profits. It would stop giant, profitable corporations, such as Amazon, Bank of America, FedEx, General Motors, Netflix, and Nike, from escaping all federal taxes. These corporations and others like them make huge profits that they report to their stockholders in filings required by the federal government. But they take advantage of multiple tax loopholes to avoid paying federal corporate income taxes. This new tax would raise roughly $200 billion to $300 billion dollars over ten years. These revenues would enable the federal government to make new investments in helping families with children, health care, child care, elder care,… Continue reading

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Build Back Better: A Transformative Plan for 21st-Century America

  By Economic Development, Economic Justice, Education, Energy, Infrastructure, PA Budget and Policy Center, Statements, Taxation, US

President Biden’s Build Back Better framework is an unprecedented and transformative plan to better the lives of all Americans—Black, brown, and white; those with low, moderate, or high incomes; the youngest children and the oldest seniors. It will help families care for children while making quality pre-K available to all 3- and 4-year-olds. It will create hundreds of thousands of good jobs, many in unionized trades and clean manufacturing while drastically cutting greenhouse gases and reducing energy costs for every household. It will reduce the cost of health care and housing for millions. And it will make college education more affordable, boosting the future prospects of our young people and our economy as a whole. It will be paid for by new taxes on the largest, most profitable corporations and the wealthiest Americans while cutting taxes for working people—all while reducing the deficit. The legislative process in America is always… Continue reading

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This Is How (and How Many) Pennsylvanians Are Helped by the Build Back Better Plan

  By Economic Development, Economic Justice, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Taxation, US

Updated November 18, 2021. President Biden’s Build Back Better plan is an unprecedented and transformative plan to better the lives of all Americans—Black, brown, and white; those with low, moderate, or high incomes; the youngest children and the oldest seniors. We have given an overview of the whole program—but here we want to focus on the many ways Pennsylvanians will be touched by the Build Back Better plan. These preliminary estimates of the numbers of Pennsylvanians who will benefit from Build Back Better are from official government sources. Soon, we will be updating them with additional and more detailed estimates from policy analysts outside government. How the Build Back Better plan helps Pennsylvania’s children and families Provides access to affordable child care. Child care is a huge burden for families in our state. The annual average cost of sending a young child to a child care center in Pennsylvania is… Continue reading

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The Prospects for Progress in DC

  By Economic Justice, PBPC Blog posts, US

News stories from Washington, D.C., are beginning to remind us of a melodrama with one cliffhanger after another—and they got worse after Speaker Pelosi decided not to hold a vote on the infrastructure bill last night. The key question appears to be: “will division between progressives and moderates in the Democratic party” be overcome so they can pass a reconciliation bill, an infrastructure bill, and an increase in the debt limit? Drama is almost always a part of major policy change, and cliffhangers sell newspapers and generate clicks on the Web. But looking forward, it seems clear that much of this daily drama is hysterical. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that President Biden and the Democrats in Congress are going to do all of these things within the next week or two. Why do I believe this? First, as a recent poll by… Continue reading

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HB 1800: A Partisan Attack on the Voters of PA

  By Elections and Voting, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Policy briefs

Today, the House State Government Committee, chaired by Representative Seth Grove, will hold a hearing on HB 1800, a bill that is a partisan attack on the right to vote in Pennsylvania. It is not actually designed to—nor will it become—law. It exists so that Representative Grove and other right-wing Republicans can continue to support Donald Trump’s Big Lie about fraud in the 2020 election while calling for changes in elections laws that would make voting more difficult. This hearing takes place at a time when Pennsylvania Republicans can’t seem to make up their minds about whether they want to engage in a bipartisan process to solve genuine problems with the administration of our elections or whether they want to placate Donald Trump and his supporters. Last week the Republican senator David Argall joined with Democratic senator Sharif Street to lead a Senate State Government Committee hearing on SB 878,… Continue reading

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We The People – PA Statement on Senate Bill 878

  By Elections and Voting, We The People–PA

We The People – PA is encouraged by the bipartisan Senate effort to find improvements in our electoral process. We welcome senators’ attention to real problems instead of reinforcing myths about the 2020 election. The bill has some good elements but some that concern us as well. So, we also welcome the opportunity that Senators Argall and Street have provided to suggest improvements in the bill. In considering each part of the bill, we suggest that senators keep in mind the following principles. First, the primary goal of any election reforms should be to make voting easier and more accessible for the people of Pennsylvania. Second, while the security of elections is critical to all of us, we must not adopt security features that are unnecessary or that make voting less accessible. Third, county officials can only make voting accessible and secure if they are well funded. Many of the… Continue reading

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We The People – PA Statement on Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee Actions

  By Democracy, Elections and Voting, We The People–PA

Harrisburg, PA — the following is a statement from Marc Stier, director of the PA Budget and Policy Center and chair of the We The People PA campaign. Pennsylvania Senate Republicans are unwilling to address the problems of working people while small businesses and families all over the Commonwealth are still suffering from the effects of a COVID-19 pandemic that has recently become more serious due to the Delta variant of the virus. They have no plans to spend the $7.5 billion of our tax dollars in state bank accounts to help citizens, yet they do have time to continue to spread Donald Trump’s lies and misstatements about the 2020 election under the guise of conducting an utterly unnecessary and duplicative “forensic audit” of it. The latest example of this effort was a decision today, on a 7-4 party-line vote, to issue subpoenas to secure more information about which Pennsylvanians voted and how they voted in recent… Continue reading