PhillyDeals: Corbett sees business benefit in budget

Gov. Corbett says he wants Pennsylvania to look more like Texas, where he went to law school.

So he's proposing cutting school and college spending, and preserving the gas business from taxes.

The budget also would preserve key business tax breaks, and consolidate the "economic development" programs that proliferated under his predecessors. In his budget message, Corbett says the tax credits aren't "a favor to businesses," but "a promise to their workers."

He defends tax breaks for moviemakers, like the ones developer Jeffrey Rotwitt hopes to lure to his state- and union-funded Sun Center Studios in Delaware County. Corbett says movie tax credits "attract jobs and pump money from outside the

state into our economy."

Corbett wants to increase research and development tax credits for computer, drug, chemical, and farm industries, while cutting aid to the Ben Franklin Technology funds that subsidize new tech companies.

The governor defends his decision not to tax Marcellus Shale natural gas. He hopes gas companies will move here and use the state as a base to drill deeper, to the gassy Utica Shale. Big Gas will "make Pennsylvania the Texas of the natural gas boom," as long as "we don't scare off these industries with new taxes."

Last week's item about Insight Pharmaceuticals, Langhorne-based owner of Sucrets sore-throat drops, Anacin painkillers, and other "orphan" remedies, got local memories working overtime.

As a child in Glenolden, in the 1930s, "our class would visit H.K. Mulford," the firm that made Sucrets, recalls Arthur J. Griffith of Media.

The farm operated by Philadelphia-based Mulford grew digitalis for blood thinners and housed "snakes, mice, rats, and horses," for product testing. Griffith said that's where Sucrets was developed.

Mulford became part of Sharp & Dohme, with offices at 640 N. Broad St., Philadelphia, the building that's now home to Osteria restaurant and the apartments upstairs.

Merck bought Sharp & Dohme and Sucrets in 1953 and moved the work out to its labs in West Point, Montgomery County, recalled Merck veteran David Landes.

Merck sold Sucrets to Beecham Labs, which was purchased by Philadelphia's Smith Kline & French. Successor SmithKline Beecham finally sold Sucrets to Insight, which says it has boosted the brand by reintroducing the old tin boxes.

"Thanks for reminding me of the awful taste," writes Anna Iredale of West Chester.

DuPont Co. and Johnson & Johnson are among U.S. companies whose valuable computer data have been stolen, possibly by Chinese rivals, Bloomberg L.P. reports.

"Some of the attacks mirror the one against Google Inc., which said in January 2010 that it had lost intellectual-property assets to hackers based in China and that about 20 other companies were victims of the same kind of intrusions," according to Bloomberg.

The attacks are the subject of thousands of confidential e-mails to a British security firm that hackers for the group Anonymous shared with reporters: "The incidents described in the stolen e-mails portray industrial espionage by hackers based in China, Russia, and other countries," corroborated by FBI sources, says Bloomberg.

A spokesman for China denied wrongdoing. DuPont and Johnson & Johnson wouldn't comment.

The former General Motors Corp., in bankruptcy, has agreed to pay $51 million to the Environmental Protection Agency to cover cleanup costs at landfills across the United States, Preet Bhara, top federal prosecutor in New York, announced.

Local payouts include $381,000 for the former Chemclene dump on Phoenixville Pike near Malvern; and $1.2 million for the Delaware Sand & Gravel Superfund Site south of Wilmington, among others.

Hill International Inc., the Marlton-based construction-management firm, got its foreign workers out of Libya as the North African country degenerated into civil war.

Hill risks losing up to $50 million in annual revenue and $4 million in profit (10 cents a share), "should work in Libya not continue," analyst Joseph D. Foresi told clients at Janney Capital Markets in a report. Libya is about 11 percent of Hill's global business. The firm was helping build leader Moammar Gadhafi's state university system.