A Response to the Commonwealth Foundation

There is nothing quite so insulting to one's intelligence as a snake oil salesman. Even worse is one who comes back to the same place, peddling exactly the same shoddy goods as the first time. An editorial that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last week is one of the finest examples of snake oil salesmanship that I've read in quite a while. The author, hailing from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, is hawking the same old batch of peculiar remedies that conservatives have been promoting since the early eighties. 

Pennsylvania's population is declining, he laments, and it's all because of the reckless tax and spend policies of Governor Wolf! Breathlessly, he relates just how many Pennsylvanians are leaving the state, crushed under taxes, longing to breathe free elsewhere. If only the state would slash taxes, our residents would want to stay, and corporations would beat down the door to open up shop here--utopia would be achieved!

This argument is disingenuous on multiple fronts. In the author's own editorial, he notes that Pennsylvania has been losing residents since 2011. Tom Corbett, not Tom Wolf, was the governor then, with a heavily Republican, largely compliant state legislature. Blaming the man who wasn't even in office for the continued departure of Pennsylvania residents is an incredible assertion. Given that our first-term governor hasn't even been able to pass a budget yet due to the intransigence of state House Republicans, and no taxes have been raised, this argument is self-evidently ridiculous, unbecoming of someone who is a so-called policy analyst. 

Taking a closer look at the author's assertions gives a slightly different view. What if higher taxes really are leading to people leaving the state? How could this be true when from 2011-2014 anti-tax Republicans controlled both the Legislature and the Governor's mansion? How could this be true when the same Republicans refused to tax gas drillers to avoid discouraging business, and even cut business taxes in the state? If there is any merit to this argument, it must be said that the increased taxes have come at the local level. When Republicans refused to consider new taxes to balance a multi-year budget deficit, they slashed funding to education and other services in the state. School boards had little choice but to both cut programs and raise their only other source of funding--property taxes that many already consider unreasonably high. The decisions of Republicans in power not only led to a credit downgrade for our state, but their actions merely passed the tax increases on to local authorities. Further, the current governor's attempts to provide property tax relief across the state have been shot down by the Republican legislature. It is Republicans, not Governor Wolf, who bear responsibility for the level of taxes the Commonwealth's citizens must pay. 

But can the state's taxes really be the reason for the net loss of population? What might instead motivate many to look for better chances elsewhere are the consequences of irresponsible state governance. For any workers with children, moving out of state might become a more inviting prospect after devastating cuts to education. For many parents, the quality of schools is a key concern, and the mass closing of programs like music, the shuttering of school libraries, and the layoff of thousands of educators would not have gone unnoticed. The inequitable system of funding of education in this state further ensures that many schools struggle to provide even a basic level of education. Increased tuition and reduced programs at the state's universities due to cuts in state funding, not taxes, might also be a deterrent to staying in the Commonwealth. Broken state governance, with a bloated, expensive Legislature that has tried to silence the voices of its citizens through intensive gerrymandering and an attempted voter suppression law, is surely no encouragement to someone who is deciding whether to remain in Pennsylvania either. 

It isn't taxes that attract or repel residents, no matter what conservatives seem to think. People want good schools, good governance, and strong communities. These things are all impossible under a government that prioritizes tax cuts over services, that wants to cosset business while savaging programs that benefit its citizens, that opts for accounting gimmicks instead of responsible budgeting. Conservatives at the Commonwealth Foundation want us to forget the disaster that was the Corbett Administration, and assert that we just need a few more years of tax cuts before their supply-side utopia can finally come to fruition. But the ramblings of Pennsylvania's snake oil salesman should be ignored.