CHAMBERSBURG – It’s crunch time for the Pennsylvania budget, but it looks like everyone is off for the weekend in Harrisburg.
Apparently the plan is to really buckle down on Monday and Tuesday.
Will this budget be on time?
PA Senator Doug Mastriano predicted, “It’ll be late, but I don’t think it’ll be as late as it was last year. So, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Basically, the Senate, we’re the adults in the room here, and Josh Shapiro, of course, is asking for way, way more than we can handle, and we don’t have the budget for it, which would result in tax increases, which the Senate ain’t going to do, and the House is still a one seat plus Democrats, so they’re actually echoing exactly what Shapiro wants, and the money is not just there. I mean, the problem with Democrats is we’re finding that eventually you run out of other people’s money to spend.”
One real sticking point is that the PA House passed the budget over to the PA Senate without touching a thing.
Mastriano explained, “The governor gives us his budget proposal in February, then the House gives one to the Senate, that’s how we’ve been doing it, and then we turn around and give our version of it based on those two inputs and discussion in a private room, I’m not in the room, it’s maybe 10 people total from the governor’s office and from the House and Senate, so leadership and various committee chairs. I think they’re going to take their cue from the governor. It may stay intact. The governor is going to have to give up some more of his big ideas, which we can’t afford. There’s so much places that we need money to go more to our fire companies that are struggling, more to our first responders and our EMS, and instead it seems like the governor comes with more ideas to throw more money into Philly and into the public transport system there, while largely ignoring the rest of the state and the rest of us here. So he’s got a real problem.”
How can PA Governor Josh Shapiro be polling with such popularity?
Mastriano said, “Ever since the shutdown in 2019 and 2020 with COVID and voting integrity. I think Wolf’s numbers were extremely high too, for a while, for most of his top eight years, it was high until finally our movement sort of brought him down number wise. It’s because the media, both statewide and local, are so far left and have such deep bias, I mean, you could not find a decent or fair article about me from any of the mainstream outlets at the state level. Let me give you an example, I experienced it firsthand, I saw it, I had reporters, hey, I want to interview these topics and do completely other stuff. They lie to me directly, and then the pieces they come up with, they glow, and expand on how great the Democrats are, and they always frame the Republicans, even with the pictures they select, they’ll pick not a very good picture of the Republican candidate, for instance, and try to make their guy look good. It’s an uphill battle. This was exposed when Shapiro was Harris’s pick for vice president, and now the national media got a hold of Shapiro and saw that he’s a very flawed candidate.”
PA Representative Rich Irvin said, “I’ve been hearing that negotiations are somewhat coming together, but that does not ever mean that something can’t blow up, and I’m sure it will blow up over some something small, but what I’ve been hearing is, yes, they sent us home over the weekend, and as far as budget goes, if we get one passed by the first, second, or even the third, that’s sort of a win in my book to keep the money flowing out to your nonprofits and your schools and those people that truly do human service that do depend on the state budget to get passed. I think one of the biggest issues that Senate Republicans and the whole budget team that’s working right now is to keep the spending down as low as possible. I don’t particularly like to give away the farm to end up with a spend number that’s really low, because next year we’re going to have this same fight over that Rainy Day Funds that the governor and the House Democrats are licking their chops over, getting into. I would really like to see us not tap into the Rainy Day Fund, but then I would always like to quote Jesse Topper, our leader, who says, I don’t know if I really like our government having that much in the Rainy Day Fund, because they know it’s there to be spent, and government has a very good appetite for spending, and they always are willing to raise a budget, but they never want to cut it.”