Rendell budget 'loaded with unrealistic expectations'

Gov. Ed Rendell's call to spend $29 billion in the coming fiscal year is not getting good reviews from GOP lawmakers.

State Rep. Bob Mensch (R-Montgomery) says the governor's budget address is "loaded with unrealistic expectations."

Mensch issued the following statement in response to the governor's budget address delivered Wednesday to a joint session of the House and Senate:

"I am very disappointed with the budget proposal that has been put in front of my colleagues and me. In the past six years, the state budget has been expanded by double the rate of inflation. If it had only been grown by strictly the rate of inflation, we would be showing a surplus right now. You must ask yourself the question, are you getting a better government in return for all of the expanded spending?"

"Despite the words uttered in the budget address that this is somehow representing a cut in the budget, it is in fact a spending increase of $707 million, or about 2.5 percent. This is not the time for Pennsylvania's governor to be proposing spending increases. We should only be talking about spending freezes and spending reductions, through removing operational inefficiencies."

"A prime example of one of the problems in this budget is with the proposed closing of the Scotland School for Veterans' Children. Closing the school will save about 1/200 of 1 percent of the budget. Let's leave the kids alone. There are other, more obvious and more effective areas that need our attention, like Department of Public Welfare (DPW) and its 18,000 employees. DPW is the largest department in the state, and I won't accept that we can't find some inefficiency there to cut and help reduce our budget by I'd guess hundreds of millions of dollars."

"And raising the possibility of legalizing video poker and taxing the receipts to help students pay for higher education is yet another classic case of our governor offering unrealistic expectations to our families and college students. Pennsylvania residents are still waiting for the realization of the 2004 promise of property tax relief from slot machine gambling. If the object is to legalize video poker, then let's get it done. If the goal is to fund education, then we need to develop genuine, workable ideas on how to provide this help to families."

"Imagine if we cut all government spending back to the level of two years ago, this would effectively eliminate the deficit we now face. I realize this is a tough decision, but it is a realistic level of spending that the Commonwealth and its residents can afford."