State Rep. Eric Roe’s (R-Chester) embrace of the free market has both intellectual and sentimental underpinnings. He studied its arc through American history: formally in 2014, through a resident fellowship at John Jay Institute in Philadelphia; less formally in his own study of the stirring revival of the marketplace under the Reagan presidency. “The change ...
Everything state Rep. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-York) needed to know about putting a stop to government waste and inefficiency she learned from her time on the Dallastown Area School Board. Phillips-Hill was part of a new team of school board members elected in 2011 by voters “disgusted with taxes and spending continually going up” with no ...
Trained as a nurse, state Rep. Judy Ward (R-Blair) nonetheless has a mind for business. She calls herself an “up-and-down the line” pro-business legislator who takes offense when people chastise her for wanting to “make things easier for business.” “People who never ran, or were directly involved in a business, don’t understand how difficult it ...
Budget Finished on Time; “Bonus Depreciation” Fix Passes
July 03, 2018
Rather than the Armageddon predicted by Democrats, the passage of federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act now has Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office (IFO) predicting “an acceleration of economic growth.” Running with that positive economic news, lawmakers sent Governor Tom Wolf a balanced spending plan comfortably ahead of the June 30 fiscal deadline. The vote in ...
A decade’s supply of gas in the Marcellus and Utica Shales is no more useful to us above ground than underground if we can’t deliver it to market or encourage the market to come to us. Constructing a hub for natural gas liquids (NGLs), principally ethane, that drillers extract from the shales would allow us ...
Democrats’ “Blue Wave” May Have Already Crested
May 29, 2018
Four of the winners in the Democrats’ Pennsylvania State House primaries embraced the endorsements of local socialist organizations. This sharp lurch to the left by the Democratic Party, if it tells us anything, is an additional predictor that the so-called “Blue Wave” of Democratic victories in the mid-terms is likelier to be a mere a ...
Pennsylvania is all dressed up with nowhere to go. We sit on one of the most abundant, affordable supplies of natural gas and natural gas liquids (building blocks of hundreds of manufactured products) on the planet, and we are at risk of sitting by as downstream businesses never show up to take us to the ...
Last weekend’s gathering of conservatives in Harrisburg under at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference (PLC) was perhaps the most consequential of all. Six months before, the man most responsible for the very existence of the PLC and the surge of the conservative movement in Pennsylvania, Frederick W. Anton III, passed away in Philadelphia. With the radical ...
In the quiet of the Friday before Christmas, the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue published a policy change covering depreciation of capital investments that marks a 180-degree reversal from a 2011 change made under the Corbett Administration. Governor Tom Wolf is doing an end-around a General Assembly that for nearly four years has held fast against ...
The House came one vote short Tuesday night of reviving an on-again, off-again debate over whether to slap the natural gas drilling industry with an additional tax on energy production. Then, after a short morning session on Wednesday, lawmakers left Harrisburg for Christmas break. Business leaders expect the shale tax debate, or even the prospect ...