“For months, I have warned that a credit downgrade was looming. I have said repeatedly for three years that we must responsibly fund the budget with recurring revenues. My budget proposal was balanced, cut more than $2 billion in expenditures and consolidated agencies, while also fixing the deficit.
“The Senate understood the need for urgency and acted responsibly in July to fully fund the budget and enact recurring revenues to eliminate the deficit, and my administration has tried for weeks to hold off a downgrade.
“We must reach an immediate resolution to the budget and today’s news should be a wake-up call to come together and end this now. If an agreement has not progressed by next week, I will be forced to take further steps to manage this situation.”
HARRISBURG – Marc Stier, Director of the PA Budget and Policy Center, made the following statement following the announcement of a credit downgrade for the state of Pennsylvania:
"The decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade Pennsylvania’s credit rating should come as no surprise. There was ample warning by S&P and other credit agencies, as well as by political observers including us at PBPC, that this would be the result of the continuing failure of Republicans in the General Assembly, and especially Speaker Turzai and his followers in the House, to raise sufficient recurring revenues to close state’s long-term structural deficit. Instead, year after year, budgets passed with Republican majorities have been balanced with one-year revenues, phantom funds, and other budgetary gimmicks."
"This year, even as the sword of a credit downgrade was hanging over the heads of the taxpayers of the state who will bear the burden of the increased taxes at every level of government from school districts and municipalities to counties to the entire state, Speaker Turzai ignored the danger. Even when a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed a tax code bill with recurring revenues that would remove the sword, Speaker Turzai refused to let the House consider it. The House spent weeks out of town. And when it returned, Speaker Turzai again ignored the warnings and allowed a group of back-benchers to drag the House through a search for fantasy 'surplus funds' that those with deep knowledge of the budget insisted did not exist. And then, the House passed a plan that not only raided special funds, but included other phantom revenues from liquor and gaming legislation that has not been, and most likely will not be enacted, phantom revenues from unspecified lapsed funds, and phantom revenues from a proposal that was rejected by the courts last year. Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati summed it up best when he said, 'This is not governing; this is an embarrassment.'"
