Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf's sixth budget proposal is coming out Tuesday, with the Democrat expected to seek more money for education and emphasize the urgency of addressing student-loan debt and cleaning up lead and asbestos in schools.
Persistent cost increases for health care, prisons and pensions can be expected to absorb much of the state's natural growth in tax revenues. Thanks to healthy tax collections last year, the state has about $340 million sitting in reserve.The state's tax collections were stable through the first half of the fiscal year, reporting collections at $75 million, or 0.5%, ahead of expectations as of Jan. 1 toward its initial full-year estimate of $35.5 billion.
Wolf also is renewing his campaign to raise the minimum wage and to win approval of a tax on Marcellus Shale natural gas production to underwrite a $4.5 billion"Restore Pennsylvania" infrastructure program that includes money for controlling floodwaters, building rural broadband and cleaning up natural disasters and blight.
Wolf also said he will roll out a proposal related to student debt, seek more money to hire more caseworkers and improve oversight in human services programs, and put more funds into research and new business development programs.Wolf is expected to continue his five-year push to give more money to public schools amid a lawsuit accusing the state of harboring deep inequities in how it funds the poorest public schools.
Wolf also said he will increase funding for Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities, which are struggling with declining enrollments.It is laboring under an estimated $67 billion debt in its two large public-sector pension systems over the next 30 years, a cost that is absorbing about $3.5 billion of the current fiscal year's operating dollars, or 10%.
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