Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell sees a federal stimulus package and bailout of the states as both a fix to Pennsylvania’s current budget crunch and as a tool to revitalize the economy. Pennsylvania faces a revenue shortfall of $2.3 billion, according to Rendell’s latest guestimate. His proposed fix relies on $450 million from a federal stimulus package. However, a look at recent Pennsylvania spending shows why a federal bailout of the states is bad policy. Under Governor Rendell, Pennsylvania state spending increased 35.8%, well exceeding the rate of inflation of 17.4%. …
Starting today President Bush is hosting the North American Leaders’ Summit summit in New Orleans with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Meanwhile the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates are campaigning in Pennsylvania, a state where both have made promises they would renegotiate NAFTA to better protect Keystone state workers. Contrary to liberal protectionist rhetoric, not only has NAFTA benefited Pennsylvanians, but unilaterally changing NAFTA’s terms would be an economic and foreign policy disaster. The Washington Post wrote in their feature 5 Myths About NAFTA: 3 …
Barack Obama recently told a San Francisco fundraising audience that the reason he couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania was because the people who lived in small towns there were “bitter” and chose to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” instead of embracing Barack Obama. There are so many things wrong with this statement, but we’ll focus on just one: things have been getting better in Pennsylvania, not worse. Heritage scholar Ambassador Terry Miller looks at data from the Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce …
