At the beginning of this week, it seemed as though Pennsylvania’s three-months-late, unbalanced budget was finally heading toward a resolution. But then, one after another, various plans to close the gap sputtered out.
By Wednesday afternoon, negotiations had suffered their worst collapse yet.
Governor Tom Wolf called a surprise press conference to draw a “line in the sand,” and put forward a revenue plan that would borrow against the state-run liquor industry for the next two decades in order to resolve last year’s shortfall.
House Republicans and Democrats bitterly blamed each other for failing to come up with their own solution, and Republicans also held Wolf responsible for jettisoning their attempts to compromise. In a speech, Wolf lambasted Republicans for refusing to throw support behind a natural gas severance tax—his preference for closing the state’s structural deficit.
The PLS Reporter’s Jason Gottesman joins us for a step-by-step breakdown of what went wrong, and helps answer Harrisburg’s new million-dollar question: where do we go from here?
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