Providing Economic Opportunity for the Franklin County Middle Class

Have you found yourself sitting at the dinner table surrounded by the piling up bills wondering how in the world you're going to make financial ends meet? Can I manage to pay for groceries for the family? And there's the mortgage or rent pay. Can I pay for the kid's doctor's visits and the for-profit health insurance with ever expanding out-of-pocket amounts and deductibles? What about the car payments so I can get to work? What about the cost of gasoline or diesel make it go? Can I possibly stretch the paycheck to keep the air conditioner running in 90-degree weather? On and on... Is there a solution to this affordability crisis?

Providing economic opportunity to working-class families and low-income wage earners – putting money in their pockets – I argue will far better support the success, if not the survival, of businesses and agriculture in Franklin County.  An informal “law” of the flow of wealth is that wealth tends to attract itself.  Money flows upward into and circulates around in the pockets of the wealthy, corporations and corporate stockholders never to be seen again in the greater economy.  Wealth NEVER trickles down from accumulated wealth to benefit the middle class and working-class families.  There is no economic incentive for that to happen.  Corporate wealth is shared between the stockholders and senior management at the same time that the value of worker wages stagnates or declines.  On the other hand, much of the money in the pockets of working-class families and local agriculture tends to be spent locally energizing the local economy.  More than that, in Franklin County, the vast majority of families generate a household income of $100,000 or less.  It, therefore, stands to reason that the state best serves the local business and agricultural communities in Franklin County by engineering legislation designed to put money back in the pockets of working-class families.  The families that are watching the purchasing power of their income decline by the day consumed by rampant inflation in everything but particularly in groceries, housing, energy, for-profit insurance, and healthcare.  Indeed, many working-class families are living on the edge of just one extended hospital stay or major automotive breakdown away from bankruptcy.

So, the question becomes how does the state legislatively best serve the interest of helping to put money back in the pockets of working-class families especially in a time of economic and social chaos that is shrinking tax revenues available for budgeting?  Just a few ideas would include:

• Expanding public education to include offering pre-Kindergarten childcare on the educational starting end for young working-class families and minimal fee-based state University education for bachelor's degree education so that young adults don’t start out life burdened by catastrophic debt

• Reorder state financial support of public education to be fully based on income taxation rather than local property taxation.  This would allow the state to better and more fairly distribute funding to rural counties struggling to finance a good education for their children

• Incentivize construction of small starter homes that cost less than $100,000 generating income-based mortgage payments that a young working-class family have a shot at being able to afford.  At the same time, these starter homes must not be built at the cost of consuming productive agricultural land making use, instead, of property that is abandoned, in a condemned state, or otherwise unusable for agricultural purposes

• Until U.S. citizens have had enough of paying the extremely high cost of for-profit health insurance and enduring pre-authorization excuses not to pay when it’s needed the most, and assuming the Federal government is unable to introduce a Medicare-for-all solution, perhaps the state could look at offering some form of tax-supported Medicaid health insurance lifeline to struggling working-class families to keep parents and their kids healthy

• Incentivize ownership of warehouses to invest in installing solar arrays on their roofs and parking lots covered by solar arrays.  A substantial percentage of the energy generated from these arrays must be made available to the local power network to reduce energy costs rather than just disappearing into the amorphous energy pool of the power utilities with no financial benefit coming back to local energy consumers

Proposed gas and income tax holidays seem a nice idea helpful to many, but I argue it is not enough. Worse, how do I, as a state representative, sell the hardhat worker on the proposition that the money they would save from a gas tax holiday would compensate them for the cancelled infrastructure project from which they were going to receive a paycheck?  Or how does a state representative tell the teacher or state service worker that they don’t have a job anymore because of significantly reduced state revenues forcing the budget cuts necessary to finance the income tax holiday?

Pennsylvania can do better for its struggling working-class families and the agricultural community in these times of man-made catastrophic economic and social conditions.