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In my four years in Harrisburg I developed a specific regimen for mental hygiene: no mind-altering substances before 1 p.m.
I swore off peyote, LSD and even gave up my customary tumbler of gin at breakfast. This was a town whose inhabitants seemed to manufacture their own, natural hallucinogens. Just as Alice needed to maintain her sobriety to navigate Wonderland, I knew that to arrive at work impaired put me on an equal footing with the people who run state government.
All around me grown men and women showed up for work deluded. They lived in the illusion that growth can be created from finite resources, that revenue will magically equal their impulse to spend. It was a city in which the state song should have been “Happy Birthday to You,” because every official act presaged the giving of some gift to some friend out of someone else’s pocket.
Little wonder that my boss, Gov. Tom Corbett, was thrown off the gravy train at the first available bridge. He was in the unsociable habit of asking who was going to pay for all this.
His successor gave his answer Tuesday: you, sucker.
In fairness, Gov. Tom Wolf might have been nibbling on lotuses, or someone put the wrong herb in his breakfast tea.
Whatever the source of his delusions, he has come to believe that he can generate $4 billion in additional revenue without extracting more money from the taxpayers. Or, he is in the grip of an even worse delusion that others can be made to hand over money without realizing it.
His assertion is this: By raising the state income tax 20 percent and increasing and expanding the sales tax by another 10 percent, we can ask local governments to lower property taxes and no one that is not a millionaire will feel a pinch.
This is of a piece with the quaint notion that casino gambling has erased the property tax already. Does anyone remember that promise?
The inescapable truth is that the personal income tax and sales tax represent the overwhelming bulk of revenue going to the commonwealth. In truth, 80 percent of the state’s businesses pay the personal rate, not the corporate rate that Wolf has promised to shear in half.
The governor insisted that families earning $100,000 or less will see no demonstrable increase in their tax payments. Unless, of course, they buy things. In that case they will be paying more taxes and on items not currently taxed.
Wolf would extend the sales tax to cover all sorts of mundane purchases, including text books, newspapers, magazines, and, in a stroke that is sure to raise the price of any veteran’s funeral, both flags and caskets.
He would like to extend the tax to cover what are known as professional services. This means a 6.6 percent sales tax when you hire a lawyer, engage a consultant or seek out the services of an accountant. So, doing your taxes would now be taxable.
This sort of thing makes perfect sense in Harrisburg. The shudder and cry for an extraction tax on natural gas has been justified by the fact that everyone else has one. Not everyone else has a state income tax, but this truth has been no impediment in the march toward the outer boundaries of fiscal Wonderland, where the denizens declare that we shall have both and, if possible, more.
The governor took pains to say that much, if not most, of this new revenue will go toward the funding our educational system. Whether this means hiring back laid-off teachers or providing raises for the survivors, is something that will be sorted out at the local level. Let us hope someone keeps a tally, because it would be instructive.
The new governor exists in the orthodox world of Harrisburg thought. He believes we have a revenue problem.
The heretic he replaced believed we have a spending problem.
My own surmise is that we have a reality problem.
We keep thinking that every time money disappears some malevolent force took it and hid it away. And we persist in thinking we can make it reappear by reshuffling the tax structure and hoping the least vengeful victims are short-changed.