Common Sense Weekly

Welcome to Common Sense Weekly! This is the Commonwealth Foundation's weekly news roundup of policy issues being debated in Harrisburg and across Pennsylvania.

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New Year, New Taxes in Pennsylvania

The new year is always a great opportunity to shed vices like smoking and binge eating. For state and local lawmakers, their guilty pleasure tends to involve overspending and sticking taxpayers with the bill. If Pennsylvania lawmakers thought to quit this dirty habit in 2025, they are off to a bad start.

Four of Pennsylvania’s five most populous counties can expect increased property taxes. From Cumberland County’s

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modest 4% hike to Lackawanna’s whopping 33% tax increase

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, more than 5 million

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Pennsylvanians will pay higher county taxes in 2025.

Allegheny County will see the biggest hike. The county executive pitched an astonishing 47% property tax increase

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, which the county council negotiated down to 36%. Compromise in politics is always appreciated, but public officials must do better than double-digit tax hikes.



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PA’s Shapiro Blames PJM, Not Supply and Demand, for Soaring Electricity Costs

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) filed a complaint

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with the federal government against America’s largest energy grid operator, PJM Interconnection, suggesting its rules are responsible for last summer’s record-high power auction prices.

The grid operator and energy industry analysts, however, point to another culprit: Soaring demand for electricity at the same time power plants are being retired, reducing supply.

PJM is not a power company. Instead, it coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity across 13 states (including Pennsylvania) and the District of Columbia. It relies on market capacity auctions to receive commitments from electricity generators to meet future demand.



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Philadelphia Public Schools Have an Antisemitism Problem — Where Does Shapiro Stand?

An unsettling report dropped over the holiday break. The civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education found that Jewish students suffered severe and prolonged antisemitism while attending Philadelphia public schools — and the school district failed to protect them.

The report not only detailed the extensive abuse but also highlighted the school district’s lackluster response. A group representing about 250 Jewish families provided federal investigators with extensive evidence of antisemitic harassment, including stories of swastika graffiti and Hitler salutes. Despite the “repeated, extensive notice” by the federal agency, the school district “has not demonstrated its fulfillment” of its legal obligation to protect students, resulting in a settlement between the district and the federal government.

Racial and religious rhetoric has inspired Gov. Josh Shapiro to speak up in the past.



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Governors Display Bipartisan Support For Nuclear Energy

Some of the largest companies on the planet have been generating headlines in the final weeks and months of 2024 for their efforts to scale up nuclear energy production. On October 14, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company, the world’s fourth largest by market cap, had “signed a pioneering agreement to purchase clean energy in the US from Kairos Power, a leader in building small modular nuclear reactors,” which Pichai described as Google’s “latest step in our history of accelerating clean energy sources and will help support AI investments.”

Two days after Google broke the news of its agreement with Kairos Power, Amazon, which has the fifth largest market cap on the planet, announced it will invest half a billion dollars in X-energy, a leader in the advanced nuclear reactor and fuel technology space. With its investment in X-energy, Amazon said in a statement that the company aims “to bring more than 5 gigawatts online in the United States by 2039, the largest commercial deployment target of small modular reactors (SMRs) to date.”



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