BCT Editorial – 4/22/08

This page was last updated on April 22, 2008.

Lousy options; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 22, 2008.

The editorial subtitle is “To fund roads and bridges, lawmakers must chose [sic] between a gimmick and doing nothing.”

I’ll limit my comments to the following excerpts since I don’t trust the factual content of the editorial and I don’t have the time to perform the due diligence needed to comment responsibly.

The editorial begins with, “Governing responsibly is hard. In addition to balancing spending and taxation, it means knowing when to cut the former and when to hike the latter.” Quick, tell me the last time a Times editorial advocated any serious spending cuts, especially at the commonwealth level. Indeed, Times editorials constantly tell us our taxes are OK and that we’re greedy for not wanting them to increase. Examples include “Bitter harvest” and “Tax haven.”

Toward the end we read “Both proposals are bad, but we’re not putting the blame entirely on Rendell. He has had to resort to these funding gimmicks because state lawmakers were absolutely terrified at the prospect of raising the gasoline and diesel fuel taxes when times were good. Now that the economy is struggling and fuel costs are skyrocketing, raising taxes has gone beyond impossible.” Apparently the fact that our overall tax rate (32.7%) is already near its historical high (34% in 2000) is not an issue.