Senate Democrats offer alternative to Corbett budget
They may be in the minority, but that didn't stop state Senate Democrats on Thursday morning from laying out an alternative to Gov. Corbett's $27.3 billion budget, which contains deep cuts for public schools and state-aided universities.
They may be in the minority, but that didn't stop state Senate Democrats on Thursday morning from laying out an alternative to Gov. Corbett's $27.3 billion budget, which contains deep cuts for public schools and state-aided universities.
At a news conference in Philadelphia, the Democrats said they could find roughly $1.1 billion in savings - not cuts, they stressed, but savings - without breaking much of a sweat.
Then, they said, they would use the money generated from those savings to restore funding for basic and higher education, as well as a slew of safety-net programs that would get the ax under Corbett's budget blueprint, including ones for job training and mortgage foreclosure assistance.
"This budget is one of misplaced priorities," Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) said of Corbett's plan, which does not call for any new taxes or fees, including no new levy on the extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale.
Some suggestions in the Democratic plan, according to Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Phila.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee:
Merge departments within the Department of Corrections, a big target. In Corbett's proposed budget for the 2011-12 fiscal year, spending on corrections, education, and medical assistance and other Department of Public Welfare programs make up 86 percent of total spending.
Consolidate the state's various prescription drug purchases. Pennsylvania spends more than $2 billion annually on prescription drugs for nearly 2.1 million citizens, including the elderly, through 17 drug programs overseen by nine agencies, according to an audit last year by Auditor General Jack Wagner - who called for consolidating.
Approve a Marcellus Shale tax on natural-gas drilling, while eliminating other business tax breaks suggested by the governor.
Some of these ideas - notably, the proposal to consolidate prescription-drug purchases - were tried by another Democrat, former Gov. Ed Rendell, but ran into opposition from some Republican lawmakers.
Democrats have portrayed Corbett's plan as unfair to the middle class, and they did so again on Thursday. "We need to push back against the governor's budget," said Hughes. ". . . He balanced the budget on the backs of working families and children."
Corbett, for his part, has said he would listen to alternatives, as long as his bottom line-spending figure for the budget - $27.3 billion - remained the same.
What the governor has repeatedly made clear, however, is that he won't listen to any proposal for new or higher taxes.
