If you follow Pennsylvania politics for even a few months, you figure out that the standard mindset in the Keystone State is to assume that we are not citizens of a larger world. If things are bad, they must be the worst right here at home. The pothole capital? The home of sports teams that always freeze in the clutch? The worst crime? The biggest garbage dumps? We think we’ve got it bad and we like that just fine.
Take the debate over the current economic downturn. Don’t look at the facts and the statistics. Just assume that Pennsylvania is the worst of the worst when it comes to suffering at the hands of Chinese exporters or Indian out-sourcers. Oops! Maybe you did peek at the state revenue collection tables in the January issue of GOVERNING Magazine and saw the comparison of third quarter state revenues in 2009 compared to revenues for that same period in 2008. If you did, you would know that – relatively speaking – Pennsylvania ain’t doing so bad. The Keystone State had the lowest decline among the five Mid-Atlantic States – minus 7.5% compared to the Mid-Atlantic average of minus 9.3%.
If you looked further, you would have seen that Pennsylvania ranked 12th among the 50 states but ranked well below the national aggregate revenue decline of 11.1% percent and, as a state, fared better than any individual region of the states including the Southeastern United States where the average revenue decline was 8.1% compared to PA’s 7.5%. Now, tax collections are not an iron-clad indicator of a state’s economic health, but it’s significant to note that we're in better shape than 75% of our sister states.
Can Governor Ed put a positive spin on the above in his February budget message? “Yeah, our revenues suck. But not as bad as Alaska’s, where revenues were down 52.4% on Sara Palin’s watch.”
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