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Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget plan morphs hourly.

Monday night, he went to sleep with a plan that raised income taxes by 13.6 percent, expanded sales tax to cover such items as bowling alleys and singing telegrams, and taxed Marcellus Shale at 5 percent.

By morning, his new blueprint increased income tax by 16 percent, taxed the Marcellus at 3.5 percent but kept intact an effective 6 percent impact fee, and freed both the bowler and the singing telegram from the state’s heavy hand. What a guy.

With each passing day, the governor and his troupe adapt their plan in a way that will convince Republican rank-and-file lawmakers that being hanged from a lower branch is more desirable. He seems not to understand that legislators don’t want to hang at all and would rather he stopped watering the tree.

The newest trick is clever, but not enough. Wolf also proposes to impose some sort of freeze on property taxes for senior citizens. This would be nice if the state had the power to stop school districts from raising them later on, but it has not. Property tax relief is desirable, but this legislation is there to allow legislators to say they somehow cut taxes while raising them, or to allow Democrats to say Republicans voted against tax relief for senior citizens.

The reality is that Wolf wants about $2 billion more to feed into the budgets of the public-sector unions that elected him. Taxpayers are all in favor of people paying their debts, but they would prefer that the debtors use their own money.

The governor unleashed Budget 3.0 at midday Tuesday, 12 hours before the House was supposed to take up his earlier proposal, the one they’d had time to read. This switcheroo will take a bit of careful reading and long division and it is hard to know its full implications. In other words, it’s a typical state budget, at a time Wolf insists that typical is not good enough.

At an invitation-only press conference Monday, the governor laid out dire predictions, pointed out that spending on human services and education and state pensions take up so much of the budget that there are few places left to cut. This was the argument his predecessor, Tom Corbett, used to make. As did Corbett’s predecessor, and the one before that.

In an era in which demagogues and political jobbers go on at length about income inequality, we must seriously confront something we have ignored since the Great Recession of 2008: There is also an inequality of burden. Every sector of the economy saw a loss in average income and spending power except for education and medicine.

We already had acknowledged that medical costs are out-of-control. Sentiment prevents us from telling teachers no. Not only teachers but road crews, public safety officials, the entire retinue of people who perform valuable services seem to be beyond the reach of the word “no.”

America now is divided not merely between the rich and the poor, but between the governing class and those expected to finance it. That is at the root of the problem. In 2003, the state budget sat at $20.4 billion. Last year, it was more than $29 billion. This year, Wolf proposes to spend $31 billion. In 15 years, state spending has risen by roughly 50 percent. Pennsylvania’s median household income has gone up by only less than half as much.

When the pace of spending outstrips that of earning, a state reaches a point at which it must ask itself whether it has a problem with revenue or with spending.

Maybe that’s what the forthcoming budget vote is really about.

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Dennis Roddy served as a special assistant to Gov. Tom Corbett and is a writer and consultant living in Pittsburgh.