By spending state Act 13 impact-fee money in ways unrelated to its intended use in offsetting drilling's effects, 10 counties and 20 municipalities in Pennsylvania bolstered the case against the natural gas severance tax sought by Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf and his supporters.
State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale's recent report on that questionable spending “revealed some officials aren't prioritizing the costs related to natural gas drilling or, worse, the expenses associated with drilling were exaggerated from the beginning,” observes Elizabeth Stelle, Commonwealth Foundation director of policy analysis. Thus, “It's now clearer than ever that the impact fee is addressing far more than drilling impacts. It is clearly a tax.” And one that the state's Independent Fiscal Office estimates is equivalent to a 6.9-percent severance tax, higher than Louisiana's, Wyoming's and West Virginia's severance taxes.
As another budget battle looms in Harrisburg, Ms. Stelle notes, gas prices are still rebounding “from record lows” at the end of a year when the industry “shed a third of its jobs.” That would make another effort to pass an additional severance tax “a transparent attempt to balance the budget on the backs of working people.”
Implementing a severance tax also would perpetuate the misbegotten notion that Pennsylvania has a revenue problem, not a spending problem — and further feed Harrisburg's hunger for ever more taxpayer money to spend.
