Inquirer Editorial: Serving up the pain

Gov. Corbett dropped the other shoe of his "no new taxes" pledge Tuesday by proposing one of the most devastating education budgets in memory.

The governor's $27.3 billion state budget for fiscal 2012 - a 3.1 percent decrease from this year - would slash about $1.5 billion from state aid to school districts and higher education.

The four state-related universities would lose half their state funding: Penn State would lose $153 million; Temple, $82.5 million; Pitt, $80 million; and Lincoln, nearly $7 million. The 14 colleges in the State System of Higher Education also would see their funding cut in half.

In his budget speech, Corbett said people voted in November for his promise of no tax increases. It turns out they also voted for tuition increases that will put college out of reach for more working families.

And they voted for the inevitable property-tax increases that school districts will impose to make up for a portion of their lost state aid. Corbett's request for school employees to take a one-year pay freeze is reasonable, but he provides no real leverage to make it happen.

This budget proposes a full-scale retreat from the student achievement gains of recent years, while the state was boosting its share of total education spending. The legislature must not allow this reversal while tinkering with the partisan distraction of school vouchers.

Nobody envies Corbett's job. He arrived in Harrisburg confronting the loss of $2.6 billion in federal aid, and an overall shortfall of $4.1 billion. Public-employee pension costs and debt payments are soaring. Tax collections are stagnant; jobs scarce.

"We must tax no more," Corbett said, "because the people have no more to give."

No, but the natural-gas drillers have more to give. And so do the multistate corporations that take advantage of a loophole to avoid paying taxes in Pennsylvania.

Corbett's proposal is maddening because, after being painted into a corner by the poor economy, he restricts his options even further by refusing to consider any new revenue sources. Why should a student struggling to stay in college pay 25 percent more in tuition, while a multibillion-dollar oil company pays no production tax on the methane it reaps from Pennsylvania?

"Let's make Pennsylvania the Texas of the natural-gas boom," Corbett declared. But even Texas charges a production tax on drillers. While drilling companies threaten water supplies and burden the state's infrastructure, Pennsylvania fails to collect its fair share to offset those added costs.

The ne'er-do-well legislature gets off lightly in Corbett's proposed budget. He would cut only $4 million from the General Assembly's $300 million allocation. The budget would eliminate 1,500 state jobs, but apparently few of them would be at the Capitol.

Corbett rightly proposes to eliminate the legislature's "walking-around money," grants that help individual legislators win favor back home at election time. He also announced the creation of a task force to examine privatizing the state's liquor-store monopoly.

People expected pain in this budget. But they also expected the pain to be spread fairly.