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In language that would have gotten him thrown off any domestic air carrier, Gov. Tom Wolf has laid out a vision of biblical wrath and celestial cataclysm if the General Assembly fails to raise taxes.
Twenty-three thousand educators cast to the streets, woebegone pensioners deciding between insulin and bread, 221,000 impoverished children with “nowhere to go,” victims of domestic violence chased into the long night – all this and more is his prediction should lawmakers not gather their senses and raise the income tax by 11 percent.
I have heard speeches by the late Ian Paisley that were less fraught, and been panhandled by street drunks with more finesse. Wolf’s performance was one for the ages, a reckoning out of the Old Testament as told by the dean of students.
He spoke of a “ticking time bomb,” which doubtless had some in the galleries turning a quick glance to the nearest exit. He summoned images of a train careening toward a crash. He invoked “a fresh start,” and the budget document he released broke with decorum, if not tradition, by carrying his photograph next to his campaign slogans of two years ago as if this were simply a campaign visit to a red county.
He accused legislative Republicans of walking away from a budget agreement that one chamber never passed, and acted as if his prior tax demands had not been rejected unanimously by both parties. In a rhetorical flourish worthy of Queen Victoria, he warned them, “do not send me another budget full of gimmicks that are too cute by half … I will not be amused. I will not be fooled.”
Common legislative speech craft speaks of a “target-target” approach. There are two targets. The best of them will speak to both on different levels. Thus, Wolf spoke past the House and Senate members assembled to hear his wisdom, and reached out with words of panic to the general population.
Nobody in the chamber believes his predictions that the state will implode without tax increases. They know that Wolf has political debts to pay, particularly to the two state teachers unions, and the state is already investing more of its dollars in basic education than at any time in its history.
In fact, 15 years ago, the general fund budget was $20 billion. Today it is $30 billion. It would take a mighty gust of inflation to drive those numbers. Legislators know we have less of a revenue problem than we have a spending problem. They should know. In the course of the last 15 years, they helped to cause it with a pension buyoff, primarily benefiting teachers, that has now crushed us under a $57 billion unfunded liability.
The scare language was for the folks back home. His mission completed, Wolf returned to the General Assembly with language that at once tickles my sense of whimsy and shocks my common sense.
“But if you won’t face up to the reality of the situation we’re in,” he told them, “if you ignore that time bomb ticking, if you won’t take seriously your responsibility to the people of Pennsylvania – then find another job.”
After legislators retrieved their lower jaws from the floor, Wolf summed up the moment by intimating that they lack courage, are unreasonable and cannot count. In short, in a crisis that called for the governor to hit the reset button, he pressed the detonator.
Having doubled – no, tripled – down on belligerence, Governor Fresh Start has now brought the stakes to a vertiginous level. He must realize that if none of these vivid horrors come to pass, he will look foolish. He is banking on stratospheric property tax increases, seemingly unaware that school boards, too, can be voted out of office once they go too far.
Most of all, he risks turning the stopgap budget into the commonwealth’s default fiscal setting. That’s a bad thing. If he is really sincere in this matter, he will implore Democratic leaders to insist on a straight-up vote on the proposed taxes that must be enacted to halt the Day of Reckoning.
Run the budget bill now. Put it on the floor. If the governor and his party mean what they say, they will summon the courage he thinks legislators lack, and vote to increase income taxes by 11 percent. They will tax the Marcellus. They will expand the the sales tax to over basic cable and insurance premiums.
Surely, if this governor espies a true mandate in his election, the electorate will rally ‘round him and his legislative compadres, hoist them on their shoulders and carry them back to Harrisburg this election day without throwing a single one of them off the first bridge.
If not, the governor must face a fact to which I and my former colleagues have reconciled ourselves: Pennsylvanians didn’t elect Tom Wolf; they voted out Tom Corbett. As any budgeteer will tell you, numbers can mean different things.