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1. Shapiro’s unsustainable budget

From the Editors
 

Democrats love to use the word “sustainable” lately, so they really ought to take their own advice and look at the commonwealth’s budget through that lens.  

The 2019-2020 total budget was $33.9 billion. The current proposed budget for 2025-2026 from Governor Shapiro is $51.5 billion. That’s a 51 percent increase in a short six-year period, which we will not hesitate in calling it what it is: unsustainable.

Nearly as concerning is the fact that the current budget proposal calls for about $4.5 billion of spending from two sources of non-recurring revenue. That means almost nine percent of the proposed budget is being paid for by one-time revenue sources. Again — unsustainable, without a 32 percent increase in the income tax.

Why It Matters. All this spending might be easier to accept if it were paired with major reforms — like school choice, regulatory overhaul, or long-term pension fixes. But those ideas are nowhere in this proposal. Instead, taxpayers are footing the bill for a status quo that only grows more expensive without delivering any improvement in services — more money for the same product.

The two sources of non-recurring revenue, $1.6 billion from the rainy day fund and $2.9 billion from other reserves, make up 8.7 percent of the funding in Shapiro’s budget, and are set to run out, conveniently, after the governor’s reelection campaign.

What will happen then? Pennsylvania’s constitution requires a balanced budget, so the legislature’s only options at that point will be to cut their spending or to raise your taxes. 

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2. Bribing poor families to stay in schools that don’t work!

By Guy Ciarrocchi
 

Yes, the headline is correct. Another public school district is bribing poor families to transfer back to the very schools that they transferred the children from.

It’s outrageous, unethical, immoral and ought to be illegal — if it isn’t already.

The Westmont-Hilltop School District (WHSD) in Cambria County is paying $2000 per family when students in their community leave a cyber charter school and return to the WHSD. Remember, by definition, all children enrolled in cyber schools are there because their parents or guardians chose for them to enroll there — because the local school district school is failing, or is unsafe, or is otherwise just not working for them.

Why It Matters. Westmont-Hilltop is the latest to hit a new low: bribing parents. They’re using tax dollars to bribe parents to undo their school choice — to bribe them to leave the cyber school that they chose to return to the WHSD school they fled. The school that was not working for their children.

In the WHSD, their own data states that 47 percent of their students are “economically disadvantaged” according to government classifications. This makes a bad policy even more unethical.

My fear is that it will spread to Chester-Upland, Coatesville, Reading, or Philadelphia — home to the largest group of cyber students by far. They may prevail upon poor and working class families who need cash to pay the bills. 

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3. Lightning Round

• Christine Flowers: My hipster heckler

• Rep. Tim O’Neal: Breaking the zip code barrier and putting students first

• Stu Bykofsky: What makes the DC33 strike a tough nut to crack

• Thom Nickels: The trash police

• Paul Davis: PA Attorney General touts organized retail crime unit’s year of achievements

4. What we're reading

The Supreme Court’s term is over, but the hits just keep on coming. An 8-1 decision last week allowed the Trump administration to continue to make plans to reduce the federal workforce, but also exposed a continuing trend of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson going off the deep end. As Charles C.W. Cooke wrote in National Review, “Jackson has managed to set herself apart within” the group of three liberal justices “by declining even to pretend that she understands the purpose of her job.” Even her usual companion in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, felt compelled to to call out Jackson’s nonsense in that 8-1 decision, noting that “the plans themselves are not before this Court, at this stage, and we thus have no occasion to consider whether they can and will be carried out consistent with the constraints of law.” 

Sotomayor had been the most outspoken and politically left-leaning member of the court, but even she understands that every challenge they hear to a government action is not a chance to debate whether they personally like a policy or not, but only to pronounce on whether the law allows it. If Justice Jackson can’t understand that, she should probably just quit the court and get a show on MSNBC.