Corbett Signs Budget: How Your Money's Being Spent

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett signed the state's 2012 Budget into law, 15 minutes before midnight Thursday, June 30. While that's cutting it close, it's the first time in nine years a Pennsylvania legislature and governor have delivered the budget before the July 1 start of the fiscal year.

The budget includes a 3 percent overall cut in state spending over the 2011 fiscal year. One of the headline grabbing spending lines has been education. Governor Corbett had proposed a $1 billion cut in education spending. In the run up to the budget votes State Representative Warren Kampf (R-157) and State Senator Andy Dinniman (D-19) issued press releases saying that the final budget includes $1,276,771 more than what the governor had proposed for the Tredyffrin-Easttown School District. According to Kampf, T/E will get a total of $5.2 million in state money under the new budget.

The state budget includes no tax increases. The T/E school board voted on June 13 to increase school taxes 3.77 percent. That amounts to $171 for the average T/E homeowner.

Republicans, including Kampf, say the budget reflects the will of the people who sent them to Harrisburg to hold the line on state government spending and taxes. State house Democrats who all voted against the budget decry it as "harsh" and a "tax transfer" from state to local levels.

As the budget debates end in Harrisburg and the 2012 campaign trail debates crank up in T/E and other districts across the commonwealth, what are the actual budget numbers?

Education is the single biggest line in the budget... by a wide margin.  Education amounts to 19 percent of the budget. Medical assistance programs are the next closest at 12.6 percent, followed by corrections at 5.7 percent.

To see the entire budget as enacted, click here and select "2011-12 Enacted Budget Line-Item Appropriations" to see the actual budget, line by line.