I've been wrestling with the Mayor's new budget for a few days now. One thing I've figured out; it's not right to think about it in terms of what should reasonably be expected from Michael Nutter. In that framework I might be relatively pleased; when he was a Council member he worked hard to abolish the Business Privilege Tax in toto; now he proposes abolishing "only" the Gross Receipts part. Furthermore, he proposes to cut the rate of the Net Income portion of the BPT just 7%. Neither the Gross Receipts abolition, nor the Net Income cut is immediate; they would both be phased in over a period of years. And Nutter is also proposing an immediate 25% increase in the Parking Tax -- a relatively progressive tax -- which will make up a substantial part of the lost BPT revenue.

So as someone who thinks cutting business taxes should be a very low priority, if one at all, I could feel OK about all this compared to what might have been.

But personalizing the budget proposal is the wrong approach. The important question is not how to grade Nutter. The important question is this: are the choices the Mayor made in the budget the right ones for our City? My answer to that has got to be no.

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO is pressing legislators to pass HB 2098, a bill submitted on December 6th and sitting before the House Insurance Committee (authored by its chair, Rep. DeLuca). We were all a little disappointed earlier this year when the legislative process failed to make good on Governor Rendell's plan to allow our insurers to quit paying for infections and mistakes made by Hospitals. Then, the next thing we knew, Medicare (by far the biggest spender in Healthcare) came along and said it wasn't going to pay for those mistakes or infections starting late in 2008, anyway. Which could have nearly the same effect, so HB 2098 seeks to give our Pennsylvania insurers that same right: to refuse to pay bills for procedures correcting conditions that hospitals should have prevented.

"But wait! I thought we already solved this problem?" you ask. Sure you do. We did something about it, but we sure didn't solve it. In fact, in one very important way, we took a step backward. A big step. Click Read More to see what I mean!

I love the way THE INQUIRER is pounding the quote-unquote "Philadelphia" Parking Authority. City GOP benefits from Parking Authority. It needs it. The story starts off promisingly:

Though the Philadelphia Parking Authority has fallen short in its promised funding for city schools, it certainly has been a boon for the Philadelphia Republican Party.

Authority employees and consultants have contributed at least $214,000 to the Republican City Committee since 2001, according to an Inquirer analysis of campaign finance data.

The contributions this year have reached at least $33,210, or more than 14 percent of the party's total.

I wonder if that's the single biggest cadre of funders? Of course, "cadre of funders" gets hard to define for a newspaper article, but still I wonder.

My humble suggestion to Philadelphia reporters pursuing these questions: the story I'd like to see is some attempt to sort out how much money could, potentially, be going to schools and how, exactly, the law designates that they are supposed to determine that figure.

This schools issue is a big part of why I want to lambast the PPA so badly. If it were just an issue of over-spending and patronage, I would care but I wouldn't care as much. The simple fact is that the PPA is making our city harder to live in by tightening up parking rules, but they aren't delivering on the promised benefit of that: getting some more money into education.

Pound them, Inqy! Pound them!!!