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Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed part of the 2015-16 budget, forcing it to remain incomplete. Now, he’s put together a 2016-17 budget that’s another tax-and-spend monster.

Wolf’s latest beast doesn’t have meaningful property tax reform, liquor privatization or pension reform. What it does have is 15 new take hikes including an 11 percent income tax hike that would be retroactive to Jan. 1, 2016, and an incredibly high severance tax which would destroy Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry and the jobs it has brought to our state.

What will happen to our local colleges that have retooled and expanded programs into the oil and gas field if Wolf is successful in taxing the natural gas industry to death in Pennsylvania? What of the students starting their education in this field, will Wolf create a new version of “brain drain” in which we will graduate a class of students who will have to go to other oil- and gas-producing states to find a job?

We are less than two years into Gov. Wolf’s term and I have already had enough of his tax-and-spend politics.

Alan J. Lispi

Scranton