Jun. 27, 2015
HARRISBURG – Just days before the June 30 deadline, the state House has approved a balanced and responsible $30.18 billion budget plan for the 2015-16 fiscal year, said Rep. Kate Harper (R-Montgomery).
Harper’s comments during debate on the House floor are as follows (slightly altered during delivery). Or you can watch the video here.
“You can’t spend what you don’t have.
“We have a constitutional requirement in Pennsylvania to balance the state spending plan, the budget, by June 30 every year.
“A couple of weeks ago, this House voted unanimously to reject the governor’s budget. All Republicans and ALL Democrats voted ‘NO.’ I know a lot of people have asked us to increase spending on various line items in the budget, and I know that many of us would LOVE to spend more money on various things.
“But you can’t spend what you don’t have, and the governor’s proposal did not get a single vote because it required us to be willing to vote for an increase in the state’s income tax by 20 percent and an increase in sales taxes too, and we would be taxing things we never taxed before – like taxing young families paying for day care or taxing families with kids in college—we’d have to tax room and board to raise the revenues Gov. Tom Wolf wants.
“Worst of all – we’d be taxing families and seniors already struggling to pay for nursing home fees and home health care expenses. The governor’s proposed 6.6 percent tax on services is a staggering expense on the families I represent. I could not vote to do that to them. And neither could any of us.
“But you can’t spend what you don’t have. So if we are unwilling to levy those new taxes on the families who trusted us enough to send us here, then we simply must scale back what we are going to spend next year.
“We just cannot afford Gov. Wolf’s plan. Even the Independent Fiscal Office reported that families in every income bracket in Pennsylvania, whether the household earns less than $25,000 a year, or more than $100,000 per year, would pay much more in taxes next year. No wonder no one in this House would vote to raise those taxes, and levy the new taxes that this governor wanted. And no one back home would have voted for it either.
“Now some have said that we are just like Washington and this is a partisan battle with a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature. Not so! Pennsylvania is not gridlocked. The governor signed three new pieces of legislation just this week – a new real estate disclosure law, a new law creating ‘navigators’ for those who want to enroll in the health insurance exchanges, and a bill that allows for pharmacists to give vaccines. We passed those bills and others – including a measure to keep our 911 centers operating – in a bipartisan fashion. We can do that. We DO that. Every week that we are here, we pass bills in a bipartisan fashion, working together to better Pennsylvania.
“The issue with this governor’s budget is not partisanship. The issue is that Gov. Wolf is asking for the largest tax increase in the history of the Commonwealth and we just cannot do it. None of us could vote for it.
“The governor made an effort to use his bully pulpit and he gave speeches all over the state to drum up support for his spending plan, but he never explained to the people what it would cost to spend that money – and the governor never tried to, and never did, get support for the huge tax increases on everybody that would pay for the new money he wants to spend.
“You can’t spend what you don’t have. If you want to have $4 billion in new spending, you need $4 billion in new taxes and apparently nobody wants that.
“I did not get a single call asking me to vote for higher sales taxes or more of them. When I asked them, I had a couple of people reluctantly state they might support an increase in the personal income tax and a few who would be OK with a higher shale tax – which I said I could support so long as it was not unreasonable.
“By the way, the governor’s proposed shale tax is unreasonable. It would be the highest in the nation and would apply even if the price dropped so low the drillers were making no money. I was shocked by it and speaking as one member alone, I tell people I could vote to increase our shale tax for the right reasons.
“I thought anybody who owned a business would realize that if it costs more to produce widgets in PA than you can sell the widgets for, then the widget company doesn’t make widgets in PA, or they go out of business. I thought the governor knew that.
“The issue is not democratic blue and republican red. The issue is green. And you cannot spend whatever you don’t have – not in PA, anyway.
“Here we are, on the eve of the constitutional deadline, and we are doing our best to be responsible and meet that deadline with a budget that balances, increases educational spending, keeps most line items level funded and has no new taxes in it.
“We are NOT spending money we don’t have. This budget balances its spending and its revenues with no new taxes and we are getting it done on time.”
Representative Kate Harper
61st District
Pennsylvania House of Representatives
Media Contact: Rep. Harper’s Blue Bell Office
610.277.3230
KateHarper.net /
Facebook.com/RepKateHarper
kharper@pahousegop.com