Pa. Legislature: Workhorses and show ponies
Jerry Shenk
Recently, I had the frustrating experience of exchanging emails with a senior member of Pennsylvania’s state Legislature.
“Senior” is not an earned term of respect there. In both party caucuses, “senior” means “longtime.” In Harrisburg, time-in grade is all one needs to get the best offices and parking spots, plum committee assignments, chairmanships — and access to media.
I caught said member in a public falsehood, and, in response to my email inquiry concerning it, the member whined defensively, and then doubled down on the original prevarication despite irrefutable evidence that exposed it — in the same public document!
Pennsylvania’s Legislature contains too many people who hold the best job they’ve ever had. For many of those members, preserving their public sinecures holds a far higher priority than attending to the fiscal health of the Commonwealth and, ultimately, its citizens.
Officeholders hand out pricey “popular” enticements to buy votes, and privileges to special interests designed to attract campaign contributions rather than addressing genuine problems from which, unsolved, every citizen will ultimately suffer.
Certain members of the Pennsylvania Legislature have been “holding hearings,” “consulting,” mostly with each other, “holding forth” to the press, and generally jaw-jawing for years, while accomplishing nothing, either on pension reform or school property tax relief.
In equine terms, the Pennsylvania legislature contains a relative handful of workhorses, a stable full of show ponies and hundreds of expensive grooms paid to muck out the show ponies’ fancy, environmentally-controlled stalls while reassuring them of their importance.
Show pony time-servers’ access to the architectural grandeur of Pennsylvania’s Capitol Building allows them to imagine that they are equally grand. The self-important member with whom I corresponded is a quintessential example of the genre.
For years, show ponies have been “deliberating” about pension reform and, especially, school property tax elimination. In response to my inquiry about a public falsehood, the show pony responded, defensively, “Ask any Senator which Senator has put more time into this difficult issue than I have.” In other words, forget progress, ignore the absence of results.
Fortunately, there are some legislative workhorses who have characterized, quantified, actuarially-defined, and clearly, unambiguously, expressed the fiscal problems facing the Commonwealth and low-income seniors.
One, Rep. Frank Ryan, a second-term Lebanon County Republican, CPA and business consultant with actuarial experience, has proposed House Bill 13 which would eliminate school property taxes altogether while, among other provisions, tax retirement income other than Social Security.
Sadly, some of Harrisburg’s show ponies have already begun issuing nervous “wasn’t-my-idea-don’t-blame-me” reviews to the press without understanding Ryan’s bill, even before discussing it with him or other sponsors.
A working group has been assembled, including members from both parties and representatives from the governor’s office and public pension stakeholders, to formulate solutions to the fiscal and property tax problems on which the show ponies’ yearslong whinnying has been noticeably unproductive.
Undoubtedly, every member of the working group will offer opinions. Hopefully, all are serious workhorses. Presumably, they all seek to return the Commonwealth to fiscal health and are willing to make sacrifices to ensure it.
It’s too early to know how the working group’s deliberations will proceed, evolve and what solutions will be proposed, but, it’s time for the legislature’s as-yetuninvolved show ponies to get to work, consider taking some risks or, barring that, to show a little respect for the people doing the real work, get out of the way, and stop grandstanding for the media.
Efforts to resolve Pennsylvania’s existential pension and school property tax issues will sort out the show ponies from the workhorses soon enough.
We’ll learn who among Pennsylvania’s legislators are responsible, risk-taking members truly concerned about the Commonwealth’s future, and which ones are timid, self-interested careerists who lack the guts to honestly, objectively tackle and genuinely solve difficult issues, putting their careers on the line, if necessary, to do the right things.
Attentive, concerned Pennsylvanians are watching and taking notes.