By Marc Stier
Last year, at about this time, I was thinking about retiring from the work I’d been doing for seven years on public policy and advocacy in Pennsylvania. I knew that continuing that work effectively would require me to start a new organization and rebuild our advocacy campaign. And I knew how difficult that might be.
Today, I’m very glad I chose to work with my colleagues to start the Pennsylvania Policy Center, which is the new state affiliate of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Recent achievements
Last week, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the minimum wage in the state for the first time in 16 years. That action—and others I’ll tell you about below—would not have been possible without the work we have all done together.
So I invite you to continue your activism in state politics by signing up to receive communications from the Pennsylvania Policy Center. If you do, we can keep you up to date about how you can help design and push through a progressive agenda in Harrisburg. Even better, you can also make a small, continuing contribution to our efforts by becoming a founding sponsor of the organization. You can also follow (and share!) our work on social media by liking our Facebook page and following us on Twitter.
After a decade of stasis, Pennsylvania is finally on a path of creating an economy that works for all of us. In the last few months, the PA House has
· passed a budget that, for the first time anyone can remember, calls for more funding than the governor proposed. That budget makes a serious down payment on the funds necessary to fix our unconstitutional and immoral school funding system and adds new funding for colleges and universities, workforce training, and childcare.
· passed a bill calling for an earned income tax credit (EITC), piggybacked on the Federal EITC. The EITC will give a big boost to low-income Pennsylvanians.
· passed a bill expanding the state child and dependent tax credit, which helps low- and moderate-income Pennsylvanians pay for the childcare that enables them to go to work and support their families.
· passed an expansion of the Property Tax and Rent Rebate Program, which gives a rebate to low-income seniors and disabled people, who are heavily burdened by property taxes.
This week, we expect the House to consider and possibly pass legislation that will reform our corporate net income tax in a way that will force the large number of multinational corporations that pay nothing in Pennsylvania to pay their fair share.
These and many other accomplishments received some bipartisan support in the House. But they would not have even come up for a vote if the Democrats didn’t control access to the floor of the PA House of Representatives.
How we helped
All the progress we’ve been seeing in the last few weeks would not have been possible without the work we’ve done together over the last seven years.
With your support, we did reality-based policy analysis that generated and defended the policy proposals recently passed, as well as others. And even more importantly, our work together embedded those proposals in an attractive, progressive vision and narrative for the state. Most Democratic Party legislators and, in the last three election cycles, a majority of Pennsylvania voters have embraced it.
The future
But we’re not finished. We are working right now to push Senate Republicans to embrace these policy proposals in the next state budget. And in the long term, we need to keep expanding our base of support in every corner of the state and build progressive majorities in both the House and Senate.
Over the next year, we intend to refine our policy proposals and develop a new messaging strategy that helps Black, brown, and white Pennsylvanians of every gender and sexual orientation; from urban, suburban, and rural areas; and from every corner of the state recognize how much we have in common. We are building a new advocacy campaign, Pennsylvanians Together, that will encourage Pennsylvanians to recognize that our families and communities are all dealing with the same problems—problems that can be ameliorated by the public policies we advance.
Our goal is to replace the politics of fear, division, and hatred with a new politics of hope, community, and love.
That’s why I invite you to join our efforts as a follower and activist with the Pennsylvania Policy Center. And if you are able, please become a founding sponsor and make a small continuing contribution to our work.
This is not the time to end our work together. It’s the time to redouble our efforts.
By working together in the years to come, we can enact public policies that will provide real opportunity to all and allow all our communities to thrive.