PA House Green Lights $34 Billion Budget With No Tax Hikes, Minimum Wage Increase

By Dave Lemery | The Center Square

Overcoming Democratic attempts to table discussion or have it declared unconstitutional, Pennsylvania’s bill to establish a spending plan for the 2018-19 fiscal year advanced by a wide margin Tuesday in the House of Representatives.

But before the budget vote could be taken, there was more than three hours of often heated debate on the floor of the House, with Speaker Mike Turzai repeatedly admonishing Democratic members who sought to frame the debate around the governor’s proposal to raise the minimum wage in the state.

The legislation that passed Tuesday on a vote of 140-62 was unchanged from the version that emerged Monday from the House Appropriations Committee – a $34 billion spending plan that features no new taxes or tax increases while boosting state contributions for education, workforce development and agriculture. Also intact is a plan to put about $300 million in surplus revenue from the 2018-19 budget into the state’s rainy day fund.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget proposal in February had accounted for his minimum wage hike proposal by decreasing funding for a number of social services under the premise that workers earning more money would need less assistance from the state. With no sign of that minimum wage bill coming up for a vote anytime soon, the version of the budget that emerged this week returns social service spending to expanded levels.

To Democratic lawmakers, the adjustments to the budget plan between February and today provided an opening for the minimum wage to be part of the discussion.

“The speaker is correct, in that the minimum wage unfortunately is not in front of us, and neither is funding for general assistance,” Minority Appropriations Chairman Matthew Bradford said. “This budget, unlike last year’s budget, specifically would move to not fund general assistance for some of our most vulnerable populations. Yeah, to some that sounds like a good idea. For the majority of [the Democratic] caucus, that is simply cruel.”

After Turzai ruled that virtually any discussion of the minimum wage was to be stricken from the record – a ruling that was challenged unsuccessfully – the depositing of money into the rainy day fund became another point of contention. Rep. Bill Kortz, D-Dravosburg, argued that while the budgeted increases for general education funding were laudable, they paled in comparison to the amount of money being set aside for future downturns.

“Why didn’t we take the $300 million and put that into the basic [education] and put the $166 million [increase] into the rainy day fund?” Kortz asked. “That would have helped our school districts a lot better than what’s going on now with that, and it will help stop property tax increases that we’re all going to see from this budget in some form or another.”

Majority Leader Bryan Cutler noted that renewing the rainy day fund was needed to start putting Pennsylvania on even footing with other states when it comes to borrowing.

“There are some who have expressed a desire to spend that today, when again and again, the bond rating agencies have indicated we need to do a better job of managing our finances,” Cutler said. “I would offer that this budget responsibly manages regarding accountability and the tracking of state dollars.”

Democrats weren’t the only lawmakers with criticism of the spending proposal. Rep. Eric Nelson, R-Greensburg, took issue with how much the budget has grown over the years, even with Republican control of both houses of the Legislature.

“If we take a look back … to 2010, our budget was about $28 billion,” Nelson said. “And now we’re crossing over $14 billion more in spending in 2019 to $34 billion. We have to realize … that our revenues stem from the benefits of workers and businesses. And fortunately, because of national policies, Pennsylvania is thriving. But we’re not achieving all that we can do.”

Cutler, even while encouraging his fellow Republicans to vote for the budget, also noted that, as a compromise, it lacked some priorities that his party would have liked to have seen included.

“There are certainly a lot of unresolved policy issues, and it would be easy to point to those items that were not yet included, as a reason to be ‘no,’” Cutler said. “Our own side, our own caucus could point to the lack of significant regulatory reform. But the truth is we should focus instead, as we’ve tried to focus the debate, on what it does do.”

The budget bill moves on to the Senate for consideration.