HARRISBURG GOP blocks Rendell on increasing taxes

The governor has become more emphatic than ever on the need for more taxes.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Ed Rendell has insisted for more than four months that higher state taxes are inevitable -- ever since his first speech as governor to the Democratic State Committee.
"Are we going to need to raise some new revenue?" he asked the adoring crowd March 15. "Of course."
Nowadays, with his name on proposals to increase taxes and fees by more than $3 billion a year, Rendell is more emphatic than ever on this point.
Even without his plans to slash property taxes, improve public schools and stimulate the state's economy, Rendell warns that the current state budget contains a $1 billion revenue shortfall, partly because lawmakers never approved $400 million in higher fees and taxes that he proposed.
"Raising revenues is inescapable this year," he told a news conference last week. "Once everyone gets it in their minds that they're going to have to raise revenues anyway, then I think there's [more than enough votes in both houses] for raising money to educate our kids."
The trouble is, Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature are not convinced.
What crisis?
"We don't have a crisis," Senate Majority Leader David J. Brightbill told reporters shortly after the governor's remarks, expressing skepticism about any budget gap.
Brightbill, a Lebanon County Republican whose caucus has borne the brunt of Rendell's criticism for the impasse that has left his initiatives on indefinite hold, said he used to believe that a tax increase was inevitable. But he said Rendell showed otherwise by proposing the current budget, which forced cuts in some state programs but sustained most of state government without a major tax increase.
"We're finding out the status quo isn't so bad," he said in a turnabout of Rendell's pet line about the status quo's not being good enough.
Actually, Rendell said he hated his initial budget when he submitted it, as required, March 4 because of the service cuts it required. He asked lawmakers to defer action until he could present his spending and tax initiatives later that month, but GOP leaders pushed it through before he had time.
Rendell signed the budget March 20 but vetoed the appropriation for basic school subsidies -- more than $4 billion -- to preserve leverage in bargaining over the proposals he unveiled March 25.
Since then, little concrete progress has been made on the major issues.
Rendell wants lawmakers to reconvene immediately and settle their differences, insisting that "all of this is resolvable." Brightbill says Republican leaders are ready to negotiate, but that the governor wants too much, too soon.