Greater Harrisburg's Community Magazine

Burg Blog: Tax & Send

A dancer with the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet

“Elections have consequences.”

So said a rather resigned Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse, speaking to a few reporters following Tuesday night’s City Council meeting.

Papenfuse may have used an old political cliché, but his point was well taken. If the Trump administration gets its way on the federal budget, the city soon may run out of money to complete the remediation of a sinkhole-ravaged block of south Harrisburg, as those funds largely originate from federal programs targeted for cuts and elimination.

Papenfuse was making the point that the loss of federal funding locally is no longer theoretical—it’s real. So, a voter probably never thought about the sinkholes on S. 14th Street when casting a ballot for president last November. However, as the mayor said, elections have consequences, and an abandoned, half-done sinkhole project—leaving behind a street of empty, rotting houses that invite crime and blight—may be one of those consequences.

The Trump administration also has targeted for elimination the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Nearly every major arts organization in central PA receives funding that originates from these sources, including such regionally important groups as Jump Street, the Central PA Youth Ballet, the Harrisburg Symphony, Gamut Theatre, Open Stage, the Susquehanna Art Museum and the Susquehanna Folk Music Society. The area’s public broadcaster, WITF, would be especially hard hit, facing the loss of 10 percent of its annual budget, about $1 million.

But perhaps you’re no fan of high culture, folk music, youth programs or “Morning Edition.” Maybe you really don’t care about the people who live in houses on what turned out to be dangerously porous ground on Allison Hill. Then I’ll make another argument, an economic one.

The cuts would harm not just the people directly affected—the artists, the kids, the beleaguered residents of S. 14 Street. Each year, those federal funds set in motion a virtuous cycle that pulses through the local economy: the folks who sell tickets to shows, who run nearby restaurants, who build the stunning sets, who supply labor and materials, who do engineering and construction work for housing projects. They then take their pay and purchase groceries, get their hair done, have their cars serviced, fix their houses and buy a thousand other things in and around central PA.

If the Trump administration has its way, this money will still get spent—it’s not going for deficit reduction—but spent elsewhere, for other things. It will be sent far out of the area, to giant concrete and construction firms in Texas and California, for instance, or to the likes of enormous military contractors like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman, both based outside of Washington, D.C. These are the administration’s priorities.

Money once used to help house people and enrich our civic lives may go instead to Bechtel (San Francisco) or Martin Marietta (Raleigh, N.C.) or even to Houston-based Cemex, ironically the U.S. subsidiary of a Mexican materials giant, to pay for a few square meters of a $21 billion border wall of questionable utility (Mexico, it seems, won’t be paying for it after all) or to help finance upper-class tax cuts, another Trump priority.

Due to gerrymandering by the state legislature, six Republican-controlled congressional districts sit within about 20 miles of Harrisburg, including two that run right through our small city. We call on those members—Reps. Scott Perry, Lou Barletta, Tom Marino, Ryan Costello, Charlie Dent and Lloyd Smucker—to choose the interests of our people, our cultural assets and our economy over those of corporate behemoths located hundreds or thousands of miles away, many foreign-owned.

Our tax money should stay in central Pennsylvania, dedicated to good and necessary causes, then recycled throughout the local economy, over and over again. A benefit would accrue to us all, even if you don’t know a sinkhole from a black hole, whether you own your own opera glasses or can’t tell an arabesque from a plié.

Lawrance Binda is editor-in-chief of TheBurg.

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