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The Great Budget Impasse of 2015 Could Have Been Prevented

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It’s 100 days and counting since the legal deadline for a Pennsylvania budget.

Earlier this year, Governor Wolf joked about being prepared to face cold weather before a budget finally got completed. His
jest now looks prophetic. As of press time, we’re closing in on recent records for budget delays.

Tom Wolf loves to remind us of his academic credentials. He went to MIT. But his self-proclaimed math acumen seems to get jammed up between 26 and 102. Those are the number of Senate and House votes necessary to pass legislation in Pennsylvania, including budgets.

In March, Governor Wolf asked the legislature to impose massive tax increases, including a job-crushing additional tax on natural gas.

When Governor Wolf’s tax plan was first put up for a vote in early June, not a single legislator voted for it. Not one, either Democrat or Republican, was willing to vote for Tom Wolf’s tax increase proposal. That should have told him something.
The legislature then did its job and passed a budget on time. It was a balanced budget without broad-based tax increases.

Tom Wolf abruptly took out his veto pen. Instead of using his “line-item veto” power, the governor vetoed the entire thing.
It was the first time in half a century any governor had done that. What was truly strange was that many of the line items
— 274 of 401 — the governor vetoed were what he had asked for and, in some cases, even more than he wanted.

Thus began the great budget impasse of 2015.

After weeks without a budget, the General Assembly passed an emergency funding bill, an $11-billion stopgap budget that would have provided money for schools and human service providers. Pretty simple, logical and fair. What did the governor do? As with the original budget, he vetoed it. The governor’s team then cooked up a slightly modified tax increase package and told Republican leaders they could muster 102 votes in the House.

But, once again, that problem with counting came to the surface. Even before the vote, Democrats, like Representative Nick Kotik, were warning the governor that getting to the magic number was “a steep climb.”

When the vote was taken the first week of October, Wolf hadn’t been able to get 75 votes. That’s a long way from 102, even at MIT.

The 127-to-73 rejection of his plan to raise taxes was yet another stinging rebuke. It was bipartisan as Democrats broke ranks to join a unanimous Republican caucus in once again stopping Tom Wolf from dramatically increasing our tax burden.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed summed it up succinctly: “It was a necessary step to show the governor he doesn’t have the votes.”

But the governor, who was recently named as “the most liberal governor in the nation” (no small feat considering Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown are still in office), refused to concede the obvious. “I’m not taking anything off the table,” he intoned, meaning that he’ll be back for another shot at taxpayers’ wallets.

As much as the Wolf team would like to paint the situation as a partisan standoff, it’s simply not. A significant number of Democrats refused to go along with the Wolf tax-increase plan in addition to the Republicans who were unanimous in their opposition. They understand that massive tax increases stifle economic growth and job creation and hurt every Pennsylvanian.

Recent polls show the governor’s approval ratings plummeting. That, and the budget impasse, will continue until the governor faces the reality that the legislature carries as much of a mandate as he does and that their votes are necessary to achieve a budget.

It might be a cold day in a lot of places before that happens.