A record to examine

Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is running for re-election. With his impressive record, he has left a considerable footprint on the landscape of Pennsylvania.  It is worth a second look to fully appreciate the width and depth of that record.

The governor cut more than a billion dollars from education statewide in three years resulting in the elimination of 20,000 public school positions.  In Philadelphia, the cuts in state funding created a $304 million hole in the school budget that was partially addressed by closing 23 schools. Some of the funding has been withheld by Corbett in a deliberate hostage-taking ploy to wrest $103 million in concessions from the Philadelphia teachers union. Of the funding crisis in Philadelphia schools, Aaron Kase of Salon sums up “The pattern has become clear: defund the schools, precipitate a crisis and use that as an excuse to further attack the schools, pushing them closer and closer to a point of no return.”  Corbett is a consistent fan of public school “reform” that would drain funds from the public schools (vouchers) and open them up to private contractors (charter schools, tax credits).

Corbett eliminated state subsidized health insurance coverage for more than 40,000 low-income working adults. He is presently promoting a plan which would reject a mostly federally funded expansion of Medicaid and have 500,000 poorer Pennsylvanians participate instead in a plan paying co-payments and premiums to private insurers. His plan to close 26 of 60 state health centers  across Pennsylvania is being challenged in a suit brought by SEIU.  All of this activity is in addition to the 90,000 children who were removed from Medicare coverage by Corbett.

Eating became problematic for poor Pennsylvanians in 2012.  As reported in Philadelphia City Paper:

Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.

The bar to owning assets means poor people will have to choose between, say, eating or buying medicine - this at a time when the social safety net is being shredded from every direction.  Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars points out:

Eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country's social welfare system. But it's a cynical ruse: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don't receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.

There is not only coal in that Santa’s bag this Christmas season.  There’s natural gas - or at least hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks to the corporations who are frakking that Pennsylvania landscape for petroleum products. Other goodies for the industry include using public funds to create domestic markets and export opportunities for gas, or tax incentives for a Brazilian plastics manufacturer.

I dunno.  I kinda hope he loses.