Author: Marc Stier

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Let’s Not Let Cranky Uncle Mike Raid the State Budget

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Pennsylvania Budget

Last November we elected a President who reminds many of us of a cranky uncle who sits at the far end of the Thanksgiving or Christmas table, muttering under his breath about the “damn government” and “wasted taxes” and, quite often, “those people who cause all the trouble.” When you try to engage him in discussion, you find that he has a ready – and extremely simplistic – answer to every question, one that is lacking in any detailed understanding of what government actually does and that assumes that “it’s very simple to do x or y” if not for conniving politicians. Right now, some Republican members of the House of Representatives in Pennsylvania, with the support of outside advocates, are readying a plan to borrow massively, perhaps up to more than $2 billion, from many of the 100 or so special funds that, along with the General Fund, are… Continue reading

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Evidently You Can Make This Stuff Up: The Commonwealth Foundation (and the House GOP) on the State Budget

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, Pennsylvania Budget

Marc Stier | 08/24/2017 The Commonwealth Foundation, in recent op-eds and website posts, has presented a misleading analysis of the state budget, one that falsely claims that state spending has been increasing relative to the states’ economy. The opposite is true. Between Fiscal Year 2001 and the current fiscal year, General Fund spending has shrunk from 4.74% of state GDP to 4.25% of state GDP. The Commonwealth Foundation has also been misleading the public by claiming that state is hiding spending on a so-called “shadow budget.” 59% of what they call the shadow budget is not state spending paid for by taxes raised by the state but federal spending that flows through the state. Leaving aside this federal spending, all state spending, including but the General Fund and various special funds, has declined from 7.36% to 6.91% of state GDP between FY 2001 and FY 2018. Forthcoming proposals by the… Continue reading

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Budget Deal: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  By Budget, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Pennsylvania Budget

Marc Stier | 07/27/2017 Blog It’s time for Speaker of the House Mike Turzai to come back from his fundraising trip and call the Pennsylvania House of Representatives together and belatedly finish the Pennsylvania budget. A bipartisan majority in the Senate has passed a bill to fund the budget. While it is not perfect, if Speaker Turzai will allow it to come to the floor for a vote, it appears a similar bipartisan majority can pass it in the House as well, preferably with some amendments to it’s most problematic features. And, let there be no doubt, there are many problematic features in both the revenue package and the the companion bills passed by the Senate. But before we look at the problems, we should look at what has been achieved this year. The Republican leadership in the Senate has recognized something we have been saying all year: Pennsylvania has… Continue reading

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Don’t Take Skinny Repeal Lightly — The Dangers of the “Just Pass Something” Mentality

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts, Statements

As I write this, the Senate is moving in a somewhat haphazard way to a vote on what has been called a “skinny” repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Not only do we not know exactly what will be included in the skinny repeal, but we, like members of the Senate, are uncertain about the point of passing such a bill. Skinny Repeal as Trojan Horse Most observers of the Senate believe that the goal of enacting a skinny repeal bill is simply to keep the process of repealing, or repealing or replacing, the Affordable Care Act alive. If the Senate acts on some health care bill that is an amendment of the AHCA passed by the House, the next step will be a House-Senate Conference Committee, which would write a final bill that attempts to thread the very narrow needle between more moderate and more conservative Republicans in both… Continue reading

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Senate to Choose Between Health Catastrophe or Something Worse

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts

Mitch McConnell and his Republican allies have one more trick up their sleeves to try to get some health care bill through the Senate. This week they will seek a vote to proceed to debate on the bill passed in the House on the understanding that there will be a process, colloquially known as voterama, in which a series of votes on one or more substitutes to the bill, or amendments, will be introduced. That is, Senators are being asked to proceed to debate without any clear idea what final bill they will eventually vote on. I will say more about the process in a moment. But first I want to urge you to join the Insure PA / Protect Our Care phone bank to ask people in those states with Senators who are unsure about their position to call those Senators and ask them to vote no. (You can… Continue reading

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STATEMENT: On the State of PA Budget Negotiations

  By PA Budget and Policy Center, Pennsylvania Budget, Statements

Marc Stier, director of the PA Budget and Policy Center, made the following statement on the current state of PA budget negotiations: “If news reports are accurate, enough members of the House Republican caucus heard the voices of their constituents who contacted them in the last 24 hours to demand new recurring revenues to balance the budget in a responsible way. With the failure of Speaker Turzai’s irresponsible plan to borrow even more deeply to close the deficit, the way is open for Senate Democrats and Republicans to forge a bipartisan revenue proposal that raises taxes without burdening working people and the middle class. We are hopeful that when the House Republican leadership brings such a plan to the floor, it will secure a bipartisan majority there, as well. “This is a good day not only for the fiscal health of the Commonwealth but for the future of our democracy.” Continue reading

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Public Investment and Economic Growth: Even the Commonwealth Foundation Gets It (Sometimes)

  By Economic Development, Severance Tax, Taxation

A strange post a few days ago by Elizabeth Stelle of The Commonwealth Foundation seeks to undermine the case for a severance tax on natural gas drilling, but inadvertently explains exactly why we need new recurring revenues in the state. Stelle first repeats once again — without evidence — the same tired argument that natural gas drillers “pay more in taxes and regulatory costs than producers in competing states.” Not once has anyone at the Commonwealth Foundation quantified those regulatory costs or attempted to respond to a series of papers put out by PBPC, including this most recent one, that show that natural gas drillers are not paying much, if anything, in corporate income taxes to Pennsylvania and are paying far less in taxes (and fees) here than in other states. The second part of Stelle’s post then points out that there is a large backlog in Department of Envioornmental Protection… Continue reading

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Statement on the CBO Score of BCRA–We Told You It Couldn’t Be Fixed

  By ACA, Health Care, My Work, PA Budget and Policy Center, Statements

Earlier this week we released a blog post and a long paper called, “It Can’t Be Fixed” that explained why the basic structure of all of the Republican “repeal and replace” necessarily leads to a health care system in which large numbers of Americans and Pennsylvanians lose insurance. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) evaluation of the last version of the Senates’ Better Care Reconciliation Act (without the Cruz Amendment) released on Thursday confirms our argument once again. The CBO predicts that 22 million people will lose health insurance in the first decade. Our quick analysis of the impact on Pennsylvania shows that over one million will lose insurance in our commonwealth. The basic problem remains that the Republicans are determined to radically reduce federal spending on health care by $1.2 trillion over ten years (and more in the second ten years.). Any bill that aims to reduce spending at this… Continue reading

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It Couldn’t Be Fixed: Policy and Politics in the Republican Health Care Bill

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, PBPC Blog posts

Now that the Senate Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has failed, let’s take a step back and understand why no bill based on the Republican approach to health care could have been fixed enough to reduce the pain to levels acceptable to a majority of Republicans in Congress, let alone to the American people. The basic design of the bill was deeply flawed from the perspective of anyone who thinks that America has a responsibility to guarantee quality, affordable health care to all. The design only made sense if one, instead, seeks a politically palatable way to reject that responsibility and reduce federal health care spending in order to cut taxes on large corporations and the rich. What started as a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became a bill to partly repeal the health insurance regulations and subsidies for insurance purchased in… Continue reading

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It Can’t Be Fixed: Policy and Politics in the Republican Health Care Bill

  By ACA, Health Care, PA Budget and Policy Center, Policy reports, US

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