Democracy is alive and kicking

political party that has ruled since independence in 1957. Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has been accused of massive peculation, will be replaced by his mentor, 92-year-old former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. He promised to release opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim from prison — and did so on Wednesday — and even to turn over the country’s leadership to him. Given that Mr. Mahathir once imprisoned Mr. Anwar himself, this is a welcome sign of reconciliation between old enemies.

Armenia has seen another advance for democracy. Peaceful demonstrations in Yerevan toppled Serzh Sargsyan, who had ruled for the past 10 years as president and tried a Putinesque move to stay in power as prime minister. He has been replaced on an interim basis by the opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan, who became distinctive for protesting in a camouflage T-shirt. A peaceful, democratic revolution in a former Soviet republic is no small achievement, given how hard Mr. Putin works to support dictatorships. The price of regime change is that Armenia’s revolutionaries, unlike their predecessors in Ukraine and Georgia, have vowed not to reverse a pro-Moscow foreign policy, but this is still progress for a country struggling with the usual post-Soviet corruption and stagnation.

Protesters in Nicaragua haven’t been as successful, but they keep coming out in force against the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega even though more than 40 people have already been killed in clashes with security forces. Having scrapped term limits, President Ortega has been in power since 2007, ruling with his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo. They have bought off big business, silenced the media and squelched civil society. But now the power couple are forced to compromise with demonstrators by rescinding unpopular cuts to social services.

Finally, in Poland, more than 50,000 protesters took to the streets of Warsaw on May 12 to protest the growing corrosion of democracy at the hands of the populist Law and Justice Party.

I don’t mean to suggest that democracy is destined to prevail in Iraq, Malaysia, Nicaragua or Poland. But the fact that so many people in those countries, separated by vast differences in history, religion, ethnicity and culture, are struggling for similar rights is a sign that self-determination retains universal appeal.

Unfashionable as it may be to say so, President George W. Bush was right when he told the U.N. General Assembly in 2004: “The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls or martial laws or secret police. Over time and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.” It’s just going to take longer — maybe a lot longer — than Bush imagined. impact fee.

But Pennsylvania’s current impact fee has failed to keep pace with the incredible rise in production in the commonwealth. Special interests and critics of the governor’s proposal contend that placing a severance tax on top of the impact fee would place an unfair burden on companies.

But this is simply not true. Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office recently estimated that the lifetime tax rate of the impact fee is only 1.5 percent. With the addition of the reasonable severance tax proposed by the governor, the combined rate would rise to only 4 percent, which the IFO found would be lower than West Virginia and Oklahoma and in line with what the industry already pays in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.

Additionally, there is no evidence that a severance tax will hurt the growth of the gas industry in Pennsylvania. The commonwealth is at the epicenter of an energy revolution; we produced more than 5.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2017 and will produce trillions more by 2030. The Marcellus and Utica shales comprise a tremendously abundant resource that represents enormous profit potential for gas companies. To claim that a reasonable severance tax would somehow drive away these companies is not in line with any available evidence nor common sense.

The governor has also taken steps to minimize the burden on Pennsylvania taxpayers. This proposal expressly prohibits gas companies from passing the tax on to landowners. Additionally, because 80 percent of the extracted gas will go to other states, 80 percent of the tax will be paid by customers of those states.

Think about it: This is a way to generate nearly $250 million in additional revenue in the next fiscal year, with almost no burden on Pennsylvania residents.

Finally, the governor’s proposal also includes several measures that will benefit gas companies by helping to reduce the permit backlog and modernize permitting processes — thus removing many of the roadblocks that could slow gas companies’ ability to establish new operations and create jobs. The legislation will extend the requirement to construct a well from within one year of issuance to a more flexible three-year term.

New language will allow for permitting of multiple wells on one pad site with one application. In addition, the legislation will allow for new flexibility by allowing for an adjustment of a well bore location of up to 50 feet from the location initially proposed. These streamlined processes designed to help gas companies are further evidence that this is a fair and reasonable proposal that will not have a detrimental effect on job creation.

For all these reasons, the Legislature should put special interests aside and implement this commonsense severance tax. There is simply too much potential benefit for us to ignore, and it would finally compel gas companies who are profiting from our gas to pay their fair share. It’s time to do the right thing and pass Gov. Tom Wolf’s severance tax proposal. LIBERTY, FROM D-1