Despite ending the 2011-12 fiscal year with a $649 million fund balance, Pennsylvania fails to make the investments essential to building a strong economy or to reverse a recent trend where job growth in the Commonwealth has lagged behind other states.
So concludes the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center analysis of the enacted 2012-13 state budget, which was released Friday.
In the final budget, the General Assembly restores some of the cuts proposed by Governor Tom Corbett, while leaving intact a 10% cut to human services and deep cuts to public schools and higher education made in 2011. The budget continues to shift costs to local governments and taxpayers while adding new tax breaks for businesses.
The spending plan, at $27.656 billion, is $517 million more than the governor’s February proposal but remains below budgeted 2008-09 levels, despite four years of recession-driven increases in demand for services. The largest cut in this budget comes from the elimination of the General Assistance program, which provides a temporary monthly benefit to 68,887 Pennsylvanians who are sick, disabled, or escaping an abuser. It ends next month.
Cuts to education enacted last year, meanwhile, have diminished the quality of instruction in our poorest school districts and resulted in the loss of 14,000 jobs in 2011.
The budget squeezes money out of human services, education, and General Assistance at the same time it expands and creates new tax credits and continues the ongoing phase-out of the capital stock and franchise tax. This is part of a decade-long pattern that will see the commonwealth spending $2.4 billion on corporate tax breaks in the new budget. That amount has tripled over the last 10 years and does not count the hundreds of millions of dollars lost annually to corporate tax loopholes. Most of these tax breaks primarily benefit the largest corporations and come with no commitment to create jobs.
As the economy continues to recover, Pennsylvania will need to make public investments to build a strong economy and make Pennsylvania a place where families will want to live. This budget takes a small step in that direction, but it falls well short of where we need to be.
Check out PBPC’s budget analysis for more.