The recent budget approval has given us a new reason to believe in the old image of cigar-chomping politicians cutting deals in smoke-filled backrooms.
When it came down to a choice between protecting tax-free (and cancer-causing) cigars and chewing tobacco and protecting women, children and the most vulnerable Pennsylvanians, state lawmakers chose the stogies and chew.
Sigmund Freud famously noted that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but with this budget a cigar became a metaphor for making short-sighted spending cuts so politicians can puff about not raising taxes.
While tobacco companies are declaring victory with this budget, the people of Pennsylvania are the real losers.
This budget cuts $34 million for mental health services, $6.3 million for children and adults with autism, $5.8 million for the Human Services Development Fund, $5.5 million for libraries, $2.8 million for adult literacy programs and $102,000 for domestic violence services.
Lawmakers are following a nine-year pattern of trimming funding for vital health and human services even as demand for these services continues to grow. A devastating recession has added thousands more middle-class families to lengthy waiting lists for help.
What does that mean for Pennsylvanians?
First, cuts this large will lead to public and private sector job losses, hurting our fragile economic recovery. A loss of funding also puts needed services out of reach for many Pennsylvanians.
Last year, more than 93,000 individuals reached out to domestic violence programs statewide, but funding cutbacks forced agencies to turn away 6,000 people in crisis. The largest spike in unemployment since the Great Depression has created enormous increases in demand for mental health services, and funding cuts will make this situation much worse.
They will lead to more service reductions and lost jobs at a time when services are becoming harder to access, wait times are longer and many programs and positions already have been eliminated because of prior year funding reductions.
Last year, 37,000 adult Pennsylvanians received literacy services — down from 52,000 adults in 2007-08. Decreased funding has created waiting lists for literacy programs across the commonwealth, and further cuts are only going to add more people to the line.
For the unemployed during this recession, adult literacy services represent a lifeline for learning, helping adults fill out job applications, develop resumes and go on job interviews. The scarcity of these services will severely limit the positive contributions these potential workers would have on the economy as taxpayers.
An excise tax on cigars and smokeless tobacco would not prevent every service cut, but it would have raised $41 million in the first year.
Nearly every state taxes these dangerous products, including major tobacco-producing states such as North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. And polls show Pennsylvanians widely support this tax.
Still, lawmakers left the tobacco taxes — and other popular revenue measures such as a plan to close corporate tax loopholes — on the table while making cuts to hundreds of services for families and vulnerable people.
The smoke in that backroom is clouding the judgment of lawmakers in Harrisburg.
And it has cast a pall over Pennsylvania's ability to meet the growing demand for vital services and our future fiscal challenges.
Peg Dierkers is executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. William Dinwiddie is the executive director of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania. JoAnn Weinberger is president/executive director of the Center for Literacy in Philadelphia.