Too much still isn't enough: Pennsylvania budget woes

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(The Center Square) - One budget, two narratives.

As Gov. Josh Shapiro spent his holiday weekend touting the policy wins baked into the long overdue state budget, his critics have been crunching numbers.

Among the successes Shapiro talked up over the holiday weekend are investments in education, workforce development, orphan well plugging, health care, and more.

Together, the investments add up to $50.9 billion. It’s an increase of 4.7% from the previous year but still short of the governor’s $51.4 billion proposal.

Conservative groups like the Commonwealth Foundation say that the cost of the new budget is too high without a solution to meet the structural deficit. Even after final negotiations met Republicans’ demands to leave the state’s more than $7 billion dollar emergency savings account untouched, overspending remains a top concern.

“Without meaningful structural reform, the state’s deficit will continue to worsen, and the fiscal security of the state will hang in the balance,” wrote the foundation. “Thanks to Shapiro’s overspending, it will be the households already stretching every dollar who will foot the bill.”

The organization says that spending in this year’s budget amounts to $9,568 in spending per household. The figure does not represent how much households themselves contribute to the budget, and there have been no state tax increases this year.

What is the state buying for the sum of nearly $10,000 per household? The lion’s share goes toward Education and Human Services.

As for education, the legislature has been tasked with remedying what the state Supreme Court determined to be an unconstitutionally inequitable public school system. The department’s $19 billion appropriation, critics say, won’t be sufficient to resolve its shortcomings. The new budget works to bring some money back to schools with cyber charter reform, while promoting structured literacy to improve student outcomes.

Human Services oversees Medicaid spending, which the foundation says is “expanding far quicker than Pennsylvanian’s ability to pay for it.” Currently, about 3 million people in the state are covered by the program, which amounts to nearly a quarter of the population. It includes 39% of children and 13% of seniors.

Industry advocates have said that some of the spending is too low. On Sunday, Shapiro posted to Facebook about a $21 million for home care, “I promised to have our direct care workers’ back, and that’s what we’re delivering.”

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Homecare Association called the budget “a devastating failure of leadership.”

Transit advocates lamented that the new budget didn’t include a long-term funding source for SEPTA, Pittsburgh Regional Transit, and public transit across the state’s 67 counties. The state has already shelled out $220 million in unplanned spending to support SEPTA in the less than three weeks since the budget passed.

The Center Square reported that spending has increased 64% over the last two governors. According to data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, inflation has risen 36.69% over the same period.

This year, two new streams of revenue were proposed in the legislature—taxes on adult use marijuana and skill games. Senate Republicans rejected marijuana legalization, while legislators failed to come to agreement on the details of skill games taxes.