Jesse White – 9/23/11

This page was last updated on September 27, 2011.

Tax Credit Could Help Give Abandoned Pets a New Home; State Rep. Jesse White (D-46); September 23, 2011. Mr. White lost in Beaver County in both 2006 and 2010.

Previous White pieces I critiqued are here, here, here, and here.

You can also find this piece on the Beaver Countian. The Beaver Countian appears to be a “one man band” consisting of John Paul, a self-described “citizen journalist.”

Below is a detailed critique of excerpts from the subject opinion piece.

Here is the text of Mr. White’s bill (House Bill 1765).

I like pets as much as the next person, but I don’t believe PA taxpayers should be forced to subsidize “people who adopt a dog or cat from a Pennsylvania animal shelter.” I’d say Mr. White’s heart is in the right place, but since lefties live to spend other peoples’ money and I don’t know him personally, I have no way to know his true intentions.

As for Mr. White’s comment that “with the state sitting on a budget surplus of more than $500 million, this tax credit would put money back into the economy while ensuring that our furry friends get the love and care they deserve,” that’s hogwash. Did Mr. White not notice the failures of the huge ($850+ billion) lefty-pushed federal “stimulus” bills? I’m sure Mr. White still believes the spending of his dog’s namesake ended the Great Depression; it did not. Why not use the “budget surplus of more than $500 million” to pay down our debt?

If someone needs a $300 tax credit to “adopt a dog or cat from a Pennsylvania animal shelter,” that’s repeating the mistakes of the subprime mortgage mess. In that case, the government (primarily via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) encouraged lenders to give mortgages to people who had no chance of making the payments over the long term. $300 is a drop in the bucket for what is required to properly take care of a dog or cat. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see people figure out too late they really can’t afford the long-term cost of pet care so they eventually take the pet back to the animal shelter, if the pet is lucky.

Now let’s look at a really disturbing unintended consequence of Mr. White’s bill. The current Beaver County Humane Society adoption price for cats is $65 and $80 for dogs. This means there’s a net benefit of $220 to $235 for the adopter for doing no more than walking out the door with his new pet. This provides an economic incentive for scummy people to adopt a pet solely to get the tax credit and then abandon or kill the pet. If you think it can’t get worse, it does. As of this writing, the bill appears to grant the tax credit for each cat or dog a person adopts.