{"id":104989,"date":"2026-02-04T15:47:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T15:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/104989\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T15:47:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T15:47:09","slug":"mixed-reactions-from-lehigh-valley-legislators-after-shapiros-budget-address-lehigh-valley-regional-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/104989\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixed reactions from Lehigh Valley legislators after Shapiro\u2019s budget address | Lehigh Valley Regional News"},"content":{"rendered":"

LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa. – Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled his 2026-27 state budget Tuesday<\/a> in a speech to the State Legislature in Harrisburg.<\/p>\n

The budget totals more than $53 billion, the largest budget proposal in state history.<\/p>\n

“My budget creates a new $1 billion critical infrastructure fund,” said Shapiro. “An additional $10 million to raise that recruitment and retention bonus from $450 to $630… This budget again directs $565 million more to the schools that need it most.”<\/p>\n

To Republican State Sen. Jarrett Coleman, it sounded like a lot of wishful thinking.<\/p>\n

“This isn’t a budget, this is a political speech. That’s all this was today. you can’t even call that a budget,” said Coleman.<\/p>\n

Shapiro said he projects Pennsylvania won’t need to raise income taxes for five years, but Coleman doesn’t buy it.<\/p>\n

“We will completely deplete the rainy-day fund down to about $3 billion, and then next year’s budget will have a shortfall anywhere from $2 to $3 billion, which the only way to make that up is an income tax increase,” said Coleman.<\/p>\n

Democratic State Sen. Lisa Boscola was a lot more hopeful.<\/p>\n

“I don’t believe that rhetoric that we’re going to have a tax increase, that we can’t afford this budget. We can definitely afford this budget without a tax increase,” said Boscola. “What he’s hoping is that maybe we would tax skill games, which we should because they’re unregulated and not taxed.”<\/p>\n

In his address, Shapiro also called for an increase in the minimum wage. Boscola supports that effort, while Coleman remains skeptical.<\/p>\n

“It’s been 16 years that the minimum wage is at $7.25. We can definitely increase that and become more competitive with our neighboring states,” said Boscola.<\/p>\n

“The threat of raising the minimum wage is that you actually can hurt those that may need the boost the most. So some service entities may replace people with robots,” said Coleman.<\/p>\n

So now the work begins to meet somewhere in the middle. Coleman said, at least for now, it’s hard to see a compromise.<\/p>\n

“We’re going to run out of money. We just don’t have, we just don’t have the money to do this,” said Coleman.<\/p>\n

We asked both Coleman and Boscola if they thought we will actually see a budget passed on time this year. Boscola was confident that we would, because she doesn’t think people want to be negotiating budget issues heading into the elections in November, but Coleman said he thinks the budget fight could be even worse than last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa. – Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled his 2026-27 state budget Tuesday in a speech to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,4482,50566,33,7100,37933,28,20326,1978,16988],"class_list":{"0":"post-104989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-education-funding","12":"tag-infrastructure-fund","13":"tag-josh-shapiro","14":"tag-legislature","15":"tag-minimum-wage","16":"tag-pennsylvania","17":"tag-rainy-day-fund","18":"tag-state-budget","19":"tag-tax-increase"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}