Not enough
Our principled reaction to any budget proposed by any governing body is: Tax less, spend less. The method in the government's madness is truncating your liberty by raiding your paycheck and your profits.
The method in our response is a regard for the value of your work, and the ethical imperative that you receive from it the maximum benefit. Your dollars, filtered and frittered away through the leviathan of Washington or the mini-leviathan in Harrisburg, are unavoidably cheapened, if only because you are not spending or investing them.
Gov. Tom Ridge's budget proposal contains tax cuts of only $217 million, targeted for the poor and businesses. This comes against a backdrop of the ''Rainy Day Fund'' that is supposed to rise to $1.3 billion, and an overall 4 percent increase in spending. The total budget: $20.8 billion.
The Commonwealth Foundation, a private, public-policy research organization in the state capital, reports the following:
Foundation President Sean Duffy writes that had spending increases been limited to the rate of inflation, $2 billion could have been returned to its owners - the taxpayers.
Imagine the compounding effect on wealth if that money over the years was allowed to find its most efficient, most productive use in the private sector.
Then, perhaps, the governor would not be calling for a $10 million program to stem the ''brain-drain'' from Pennsylvania.
