(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania’s annual budget has ballooned by nearly 64% under Gov. Josh Shapiro and his predecessor, both Democrats, an investigation by The Center Square found.
The Keystone State’s budgets have increased three-and-a-half times more during the last two Democratic administrations than the previous Republican one.
When a Democrat is governor, state funding has swelled 6.3 % a year on average. When a Republican has been governor, the comparable figure has been 1.8%.
Since Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, left office in 2015, the state budget has spiked 63.6%. His Democratic successors, Tom Wolf and Shapiro, have signed into law budget increase to $47.6 billion last year from $29 billion. If the legislature approves Shapiro’s request for $51.5 billion, funding will have swelled 14% in his three years in Harrisburg.
The vast majority of the increases have gone toward the state’s budget for schools, prisons, and hospitals. Last year, Pennsylvania joined ten other states where the number of elderly (age 65 and older) exceeded children (age 17 and younger). The large percentage of old people caused the state to spend $16 billion to pay for Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for the disabled and elderly poor, in 2023, the last year for which figures are available.
Wolf and Shapiro presided over divided legislatures, with Republicans controlling the Senate during their administrations. And Wolf was governor during virtually all of the COVID-19 pandemic from February 2020 to May 2023, a three-year span when state funding swelled 29%. But the Democratic governors managed to sign larger budgets into law after proposing even larger increases.
Nathan Benefield, chief policy officer of the Commonwealth Foundation, a free market think tank, said Shapiro and Wolf, as well as Ed Rendell, a Democrat who was governor from 2005 to 2011, deserve blame for overspending.
“The situation would be worse if the legislature hadn’t rejected those spending increases—and rejected several proposed tax increases in that time,” he said in an interview with The Center Square. “And every time there was a significant budget impasse—including this year—was because the governor wanted to spend significant more than the legislature would go for.”
As a result, Pennsylvania, a state of 13.1 million people, spends more than what it takes in. This structural deficit is projected to grow to $4.8 billion this year — more than 10% of the state’s $47.6 billion budget last year. Structural deficits contribute to inflationary pressures on the cost of goods, force governments to spend money to defray the debt, and create unstable finances.
A spokesperson for Shapiro did not respond to a request for comment.
The expected shortfall has been a sticking point in negotiations between Democrats and Republicans over the state’s budget. Since the fiscal year began July 1, lawmakers have been at an impasse, a reflection of a divided legislature. Republicans control the state Senate with a 28-to-22 majority, while Democrats control the House with a one-seat majority, 102 to 101.
Shapiro has criticized Republicans as showmen rather than legislators.
“They elect their senators to be part of a full-time Senate to get paid full time, and then they worked 32 days over the last 246,” Shapiro said on Oct. 8. “It’s time for the Senate to come back to work [and] be serious about passing a budget.”
State Senate President Tempore Kim Ward, a Republican, has implied that Shapiro’s criticism is hypocritical, alluding to a trip to Canada he took earlier this month where he sought to boost trade with the nation and Great Lakes states
“He has been unable to bring the parties together so instead he flies around the state on taxpayer dollars getting his face in front of the cameras and pointing fingers,” Ward said on Oct. 21. “That’s not how, using the governor’s words, you ‘get stuff done.’”
Shapiro has proposed tapping into $1.7 billion of the state’s emergency savings account, known as the “Rainy Day Fund.
As The Center Square reported last month, state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, a Republican mulling a gubernatorial bid, rejected the two conditions for activating the account — an economic downturn or an unexpected revenue shortfall. Her opposition made it more unlikely that Shapiro and House Democrats would be able to muster the two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate to approve using money from the state’s emergency savings account.
In August, Shapiro floated a plan to boost the state’s budget to $49.9 billion, a decrease from the $51.5 billion figure he proposed in February. The 5% jump was decried by state Republican lawmakers. Yet the proposed figure would be less than spending increases in three of the four last years.
State funding rose 16.6% to $40.8 billion in 2022, 10.8% to $45.2 billion the following year, and 6% to $47.6 billion last year. In each of those years, Shapiro or his predecessor, Tom Wolf, also a Democrat, was governor.
An in-depth look at the Keystone State’s budget shows that Democratic administrations have presided over significant increases in the amount of state dollars appropriated for prisons, schools, and hospitals.
The budget for K-12 education funding jumped from $7.03 billion in 2003 to $10.3 billion in 2015, a 47% boost. Now it’s $17.58 billion, an additional 70.9% surge.
The public welfare or human services budget surged from $6.52 billion in 2003 to $11.2 billion in 2015, a 72% increase. Now it’s $18.96 billion, an additional 69.2% spike.
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The corrections department’s budget rose from $1.24 billion in 2003 to $2.05 billion in 2015, a 65% jump. Now it’s $3.15 billion, an additional 53.7% boost.
The state’s treasury budget rose 4.3% from $1.14 billion in 2015 to $1.19 billion this year.
The four categories represent 85.9% of state funding.
