It has been an interesting day with the budget announcement late last night. The press reports have been relatively good but there still are some questions about the details. I am relatively happy at this point with what I have seen. There are many things within the budget that I don’t like and the overall spend number still is too high for my liking. I am very concerned about not having an agreement on the MCare Abatement reauthorization, the Blue Cross merger and funding for full time District Attorneys (that was promised to the counties) but I am glad that the school funding formula was changed so that school districts across the state were treated more fairly instead of just giving a pile of money to the Philadelphia schools. The Rainy Day fund was a target of the Democrats this year; they wanted their hands on it for more government programs. The final agreement was that the current money in the fund would not be touched but that the usual contribution this year into the fund would be spent on general budget items. The Capital Stock and Franchise Tax phase out also was continued for another year. The Democrats, again, would have sooner taken the lost revenue from this tax cut and spent it. The new tax cuts proposed by the Senate Republicans in our Tax Stimulus Program did not make it either, but there were no new or increased taxes in this budget. Last year’s budget increase was about 5.7%, this year’s is about 3.8%. We are moving in the right direction.

- John

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.