Shorter Bill Brackbill: Who Cares If Allentown Keeps Stagnating?

Payday Lending Is the Most Evil

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

Mark Price is killing it on the payday lending bill. Here’s a status update from Mark on House bill 2191, which flew through committee yesterday. It is moving disturbingly fast, as bills with powerful moneyed backers are wont to do.

If you aren’t familiar with payday lending, it is extremely evil stuff, and exactly the sort of private tyranny that we need the state to regulate.

Mark posts a Daily Review op-ed that hits all the right notes. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking to get caught up on the issue:

Yet some lawmakers favor a bill that would allow payday lenders to operate legally in Pennsylvania, under the rationale that some borrowers have obtained such loans over the Internet despite the state prohibition, or have obtained them in neighboring states.
Rolling over is not the way to protect Pennsylvania consumers, however.
The bill purports to protect consumers from bad practices by limiting interest rates to “just” 28 percent, but it doesn’t limit fees. Nor does it preclude borrowing even against Social Security or veterans’ benefits. Several original cosponsors have taken a closer look at the bill and withdrawn their support. Good for them.

Posted in Civil Rights, The Economy

Bob Casey Supports the Paycheck Fairness Act

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

I was a little worried that the “independent fighter” rhetoric would mean that liberals weren’t going to like General Election Bob Casey very much, so I am pleased to see the senior Senator going on offense over the Paycheck Fairness Act.

From Tom Zanki:

A study released Wednesday detailing pay gaps between men and women provides more reason for federal action, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey said.
Casey, D-Pa., was referring to a congressional report by the Joint Economic Committee showing that median weekly wages for full-time working men are 17.6 percent higher nationwide than full-time working women.
That figure is 18.6 percent in Pennsylvania compared with 16.5 percent in New Jersey, according to the study released four days before Mother’s Day.
The study also concludes that 38 percent of working women nationwide are primary wage-earners in their families. Pennsylvania and New Jersey figures are near that mark at 36.5 percent and 37.5 percent, respectively.
“You hear a lot of hot air in Washington about helping mothers but not enough voting for policies (that help working mothers) such as Paycheck Fairness,” Casey said in a teleconference Wednesday, calling the gap a persistent problem rooted mostly in discrimination.

The Paycheck Fairness Act does the following things:

-Prohibiting employers from punishing employees for sharing salary information with co-workers;
-Making those who bring gender discrimination cases eligible for compensatory and punitive damages, as is standard in race and ethnicity discrimination cases.
-Providing training for women and girls on negotiating pay packages.

Casey seems to have backed Tom Smith into a corner on this, as Smith is now saying he “supports pay equality”, however, TRIAL LAWYERS! This is an unworkable position. Once you’ve admitted there’s a systematic injustice happening, you have to say what you want to do about it, if anything. The courts are really the only recourse available to women who think they are experiencing pay discrimination. So any solution is necessarily going to involve more lawsuits. There’s no way around it.

Posted in Miscellany

How to Do Budget Politics

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

Via Melissa Daniels, this is the message that we should be hearing from all Democrats:

House Democrats, meanwhile, already are expressing concern over the spending plan, including the restoration of money for education, higher education, long-term care and funding for the disabled.
“What the Senate has done today has not restored anything, quite frankly,” said state Rep. Joe Markosek, D-Allegheny. “There is not anything in here for our major, major transportation problem.”

Unfortunately, that is not the message the voters are getting, because we had 12 of the 20 Senate Democrats cross over to vote for the Senate Republican budget. That is just political malpractice.

While Jake Corman’s budget was marginally better than Tom Corbett’s budget, it’s still not a good budget from a Democrat’s perspective. Like Corman said, it meets the Tea Party’s TABOR standards.

So there’s definitely plenty to dislike in there, but that’s really beside the point.

Even if you’re a Democrat who’s mostly okay with the Senate Republican budget, you should vote against it anyway.

This is an election year. If you are a Democrat, you want to send a clear message to the voters that the Republicans are overreaching. You cannot send that clear message with a majority of the Senate Democrats crossing over to vote for the Republican budget.

The only clear shot Democrats have at winning the politics of the budget season is to reject the Republican budget on a party line vote, in the Senate and in the House.

The final vote count for the Senate budget was 39-8. It could have been 27-20. As you can see, the second spread would make the Republican budget look much more partisan and much less legitimate. It tells voters that the Republicans probably overreached if no Dems voted for it, even if those voters don’t actually know anything about the budget itself.

Now, Senate Dems didn’t totally blow it yet. Corbett and Turzai are saying the Senate budget is a “ceiling”, meaning the budget is going to get more right-wing in conference. That should give Senate Democrats all the excuse they need to vote against the budget when it comes back from conference.

On the House side, Democrats should take advantage of the Tea Party freshmens’ resistance to the Senate’s higher spending levels, and force the House Rs to find the votes entirely within the Republican caucus.

Posted in 2012 - Election or End-of-days?, Budget/Taxes/Spending

Rob Kauffman Reverses Himself and Agrees to Debate Challenger Susan Spicka

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jake Sternberger | Discuss this post |

Less than two weeks after publicly refusing to debate firebrand Democratic candidate Susan Spicka and denouncing public debates as “political showmanship,” Representative Rob Kauffman (R-PA89) has reversed himself and agreed to participate in what Spicka hopes will be one of several debates between the two candidates this year. Continue reading →

Posted in Elections, Harrisburg / South Central, House of Representatives

More People Support Gay Marriage Than Oppose It

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

On the occasion of President Obama’s Great Evolution, Nate Silver reminds us that support for marriage equality outweighs the opposition:

President Obama’s decision to endorse same-sex marriage undoubtedly entails some political risk, but recent polls suggest that public opinion is increasingly on his side.
According to surveys included in the PollingReport.com database, an average of 50 percent of American adults support same-sex marriage rights while 45 percent oppose it, based on an average of nine surveys conducted in the past year.
This is a reversal from earlier periods: support for same-sex marriage has been increasing, and opposition to it has been decreasing, at a relatively steady rate of perhaps two or three percentage points a year since 2004

Posted in Civil Rights

PA GOP Reduced to Attacking Obama for Opening Campaign Offices

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

Too sad:

The PA Republican Party Wednesday criticized Obama for America, the President’s campaign organization, on opening an office in York. But the release was a tad late – this will be the twenty-third Obama field office in Pennsylvania.
“One more office or one more visit won’t convince voters that President Obama and Senator Casey are working to help them. The Obama-Casey agenda has only held back our potential for economic growth and new jobs, while leaders like Governor Corbett here in Pennsylvania have been able to offset some of our challenges by attracting new businesses to put people back to work,” said PAGOP Chairman Rob Gleason.

And how many campaign offices does the Romney campaign have? Oh right:

The Romney campaign has an office in Harrisburg that, during the brief time when the primary looked competitive, was staffed by 4 people.

This is because for all the Tuff Talk, nobody thinks Romney can win Pennsylvania. Keegan Gibson reminds us that Rob Gleason admitted as much:

When Romney was in Harrisburg for a fundraiser, Gleason told him they would win Pennsylvania. He said Romney responded, “Really?”
“I don’t think anyone thinks we can carry Pennsylvania, I don’t think even Romney thinks we can win Pennsylvania; they’re not counting on it, but they’ll play here,” Gleason said. “We’re not asleep at the switch. We’ve been working on this for four years. This is the big one.”

Posted in 2012 - Election or End-of-days?

Urbanization Better Than Resource Extraction as a PA Jobs Strategy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

Scott Detrow covers the new Penn State Report showing Marcellus Shale counties are sending more revenue to the state in recent years:

The report finds sales tax revenues have increased by an average of 24 percent since 2007, in counties hosting at least 10 Marcellus Shale wells. Here’s an overview of the new study, from the PSU website:
The report suggests that significant effects are seen in state sales tax collections, which reflect the level of retail activity in a county. The data indicate sales tax collections in counties with significant Marcellus development continued to outperform collections in counties with less or no Marcellus activity.
“For example, sales tax collections in counties with 150 or more Marcellus wells drilled between 2007 and 2011 rose an average of nearly 24 percent during those years, compared to an average decrease of about 5 percent in counties with no Marcellus activity,” [Agricultural economics professor Timothy] Kelsey said. “Sales tax collections dropped in only three of the 23 counties with more than 10 Marcellus wells, compared to decreases in 22 of the 32 counties with no Marcellus Shale drilling.”
The increases were particularly dramatic in Bradford County (50.8 percent), Greene County (31.4 percent) and Susquehanna County (27.4 percent), three of the top six counties in the number of Marcellus gas wells. “The data support anecdotes we hear about Marcellus development increasing local retail activity,” he said.
The report also found the average total taxable income in drilling counties increased by 6.3 percent during the same period. “The average rise in income in high-activity Marcellus counties was fueled by increases in salaries and wages (3.3 percent); rights, royalties and patents (441.5 percent), which reflects gas lease and royalty payments; and net profits (1.4 percent),” the summary says.

I think the proper context for this report is that in absolute terms, the revenues are increasing from a very low *level*. Whatever the rate of increase is, these counties are never going to be returning the kind of revenue to the state that the big metros like Philly and Pittsburgh do, even with a hefty severance tax.

The recipe for long-term economic growth and revenue growth in the state is still more urbanization – moving workers out of the low-productivity rural areas, toward the higher-productivity metro areas. Focusing on natural resource extraction as a job creation strategy is just going to make the state poorer in the long run.

Posted in Business, The Economy

Pittsburgh Staring Down Transit Doomsday

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

This is what happens when you elect a Governor who’s too much of a coward to endorse his own Transportation Funding Advisory Commission’s recommendations. Almost *half* of the Pittsburgh region’s transit routes could be eliminated under the Port Authority’s austerity plan.

Angie Schmitt sends us to Yonah Freemark, who surveys the totally avoidable, yet totally impending transit doom in Pittsburgh:

The last four years have been rough on American transit riders, as fare increases and route reductions became the norm, even as demand for service increased.
For many cities there’s still no end in sight, as Pittsburgh can attest. The Steel City is facing across-the-board cuts of 35 percent if the state doesn’t step in — and that comes just a year after the Port Authority slashed transit spending 15 percent.
Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic says Pittsburgh — and other cities around the country — are suffering as a result of systemic problems with the way transit is funded at the local and national level:
The service cuts planned would be, suffice it to say, devastating. As the maps [above] illustrate, the Port Authority’s austerity plans would eliminate almost half of the region’s routes. This is in a city where, according to the U.S. Census, more than 25% of households have no vehicle available and almost 20% of workers use transit to get to work — figures that are far higher than the national average or even that of the vast majority of American center cities.
Pittsburgh, of course, is far from alone. From Boston — where a 23% fare increase and service cuts were approved a month ago — to Athens, Georgia — where night bus service is expected to be fully eliminated — American cities continue to cut their transit offerings. Friday’s U.S. national jobs report, which showed about 20,000 fewer people working in transit operations in April compared to a year ago (a 5% decline), only reinforced the fact that when it comes to transit service, cuts are the rule of the game.
At least part of the problem is the reliance on local and state revenues to subsidize operations costs for bus and rail services in cities across the country. Whereas the federal government was willing to cover more than half of the costs of a $523 million light rail expansion to Pittsburgh’s North Shore — opened in March — it can do nothing to cover the agency’s $64 million operating deficit expected for next year because of Congressionally imposed rules about what Washington can and cannot pay for.
The counterintuitive result is that cities that are doing well economically are able to pay for improved transit services whereas those with many economic problems — the ones where transit is often needed most — are left to cut operations dramatically. Thus regional inequities are reinforced.

Posted in Budget/Taxes/Spending, The Economy, Transportation

Tom Corbett Deserves a ‘Lifetime Demerit’ For Education

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Jon | Discuss this post |

I really can’t understand why anyone – anyone at all – would have anything positive to say about Tom Corbett’s “contribution” to the quality of Pennsylvania’s public education system. And apparently I am not the only one…

When blogger Jessie Ramey of Point Breeze thinks of opera, the governor and arts education together, she said “The Beggar’s Opera” comes to mind because “public schools have become beggars, hoping to salvage their arts curriculum with donations.”
When the Pittsburgh Opera thinks of opera, the governor and arts education together, it gets ready to award a Lifetime Achievement Award to Gov. Tom Corbett and his wife, Susan, for their support.
The award will be made this Saturday at the opera’s annual end-of-season benefit gala, Maecenas XXVII, at the opera headquarters.
Party-goers can expect some extras outside the event. Ms. Ramey — who said her blog “Yinzercation” has received more than 7,000 hits since the opera notice was posted Monday — and others are organizing a demonstration.
Some may wear opera gear. Ms. Ramey is considering a Viking helmet.
“This is not something that is anti-opera. This is about what’s happening to funding in our public schools,” she said.
The Corbett award, she said, “really hit a nerve. People are really reacting, and they’re passionate about arts education.”
The award has attracted about 300 comments on the opera’s Facebook page questioning the decision, calling it “unreal,” “deplorable” and “unbelievable.”

Here is the Yinzercation post that started it all, and here is the Pittsburgh Opera’s Facebook page. Do your worst!

(Thanks: Eleanor Chute)

Posted in Education