Credit: Office of the Governor
First-term Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced his $33.8 billion spending plan that raises some taxes and cuts corporate and property taxes.
The budget address, which was Wolf’s first, proposes raises taxes 16 percent while cutting property and corporate taxes.
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Here are some of the basics:
- The state’s personal income tax would go from 3.07 percent to 3.7 percent. Some lower-income families would be exempt from paying the tax.
- Property tax reductions would be to 15 percent. The goal would be to eliminate property taxes for 270,000 seniors.
- The state’s sales tax of 6 percent would go to 6.6 percent. Some current sales exemption items, like cigars, hygiene products and newspapers, would be taxed.
- The state corporate tax would decrease from 9.9 percent to 4.9 percent over the next three years. The much-talked about “Delaware loophole” would be closed.
- He also called for the hourly minimum wage to increase to $10.10
- A $1 per pack increase to the state’s cigarette tax, which is already $1.60 per pack. A new tax on e-cigarettes, large cigars, loose tobacco and smokeless tobacco.
- New severance tax on natural gas drillers would generate up to $1 billion to help fund schools, which would add another billion in funding over the next few years.
“It’s time to do something different and work together to get the state back on track. Our budget should be as bold and ambitious as Pennsylvania has been for over 300 years,” Wolf said.
The governor stated that old ideas just don’t work in current times.
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Pennsylvania currently has a structural deficit of roughly $2.3 billion, along with a mounting pension crisis. The proposed budget would bring in $4.7 billion in new revenues to the state.
Wolf’s speech on the proposed budget mentioned increases to funding education throughout the state. The message was a keystone of the York County businessman’s campaign against former Gov. Tom Corbett.
While Wolf’s budget is ambitious, it will face scrutiny when it goes through the House and Senate in Harrisburg.
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A new budget has to be approved by June 30 and goes into effect July 1.
