Proceed with caution on Wolf’s budget
Caution is the best advice for lawmakers on both sides of the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s political aisle, in response to Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed 2022-23 budget, his last as the commonwealth’s chief executive.
While it is a given that next fiscal year’s budget will hardly resemble the plan that the governor put forth on Tuesday, this is a time when the state – from the vantage point of both sides of the political aisle – must strive to avoid falling victim to any unwise spending decisions resulting from access to federal aid not heretofore available.
Without that federal money inflow in future years, the state, without careful planning, could be looking into a potential dark tunnel of debt and deficits a year or two beyond 2022-23 and extending many fiscal years after that.
While it can be said that Wolf’s eighth and last budget proposal is based on good intentions, the $43.7 billion spending plan nonetheless is ignoring reality, just as a tax decrease, rooted in the new federal money in the state’s coffers, could thrust the commonwealth quickly into a precarious money situation.
That does not imply that certain budget categories, such as education, cannot be pumped up in a reasonable way, but what Wolf is suggesting on numerous fronts smacks of excess that should not – and most likely will not – be tolerated by the House of Representatives and Senate.
That should be easy on the part of Democrats as well as Republicans, considering the obvious shock of listening to the governor propose a 16.6% one-year spending increase involving $6.2 billion.
Numbers like that should make it easy to resurrect again the phrase “dead on arrival” that was spoken often regarding previous Wolf budget-package proposals.
The billions-of-dollars deficits that Pennsylvania battled not very long ago must remain firmly planted in memory, even at a time such as now, when federal money has eased or wiped away most of those financial pressures.
Pennsylvania must not fall victim to stupidity, even if some other states do not embrace that sound advice.
Current state lawmakers and every commonwealth county and local-level municipality should think back to the era of federal revenue sharing, when budget caution was supplanted by decisions that ignored the prospect of “sharing” being someday phased out.
The mindset of many officials was that the federal money boost never would end, but it did.
Consequently, officials across this and other states found themselves scrambling in regard to plugging the financial holes that the absence of federal revenue-sharing money created.
Such a scenario could be repeated on the state level in this decade of the ’20s if the right decisions are not forthcoming in the months ahead.
The House Appropriations Committee will launch a series of budget hearings in the next week to begin examining what spending the state really needs during the fiscal year that begins July 1.
The Senate also will hold a series of public hearings in the coming weeks to, as Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair, said, produce a more responsible budget proposal that funds essential services while shielding taxpayers from the consequences of reckless overspending.
By necessity, the key word governing that task should be “caution,” and the governor should come aboard the coming mission with more acceptance and open-mindedness than his 2022-23 budget blueprint seems to project.