mean like to thank you for coming joining us today this is talking politics and peter's and our guest today as our representative john maher all right john i'm going to just ask a little bit about your history if you don't mind i noticed that  we talking about earlier that you were part of the naval reserve briefly back in seventy three and out of high school i volunteered at seventeen it was right about the time that jimmy carter reduced the fleet from six hundred ships to three hundred ships after about fifteen months clipping it was in the naval reserves i was at sea maybe six weeks chipping paint using wire brush it's distinguished by the state well that's a lot more than some believe me your education budget tell the people that once again this is we're getting into electorial period and of course that many people don't know their representatives and that's why your appreciate it bill and i was very fortunate i want an academic scholarship to duke university where i did my undergraduate work and i had fellowships at oxford university over in england and at the strategy and graduate school of management which the principal interest there was it was halfway around the world and it gave me a ticket that would get me there and back and pretty well got to see  the world as a traveller were in a pair of steel to boots crossing crossing the globe all by myself it was quite an adventure that state your undergrad at do what what did you specialize i studied management sciences and accounting is what the degree was called oddly enough to doesn't offer that's a greenie more i don't know if i should take that as a reflection on the caliber of those who earned a degree before the eliminated but it's it's an interesting it's a great opportunity for many years i went and became a c p a were one of the international accounting firms starting in pittsburgh and serving their national office up in new york returned to pittsburgh and decided to launch a firm dedicated towards those who want to pursue the profession and promote the greater good and i built a c p a from scratch that was dedicated to serving charitable sector the public sector and local governments and although i'm retired from that practiced so that i can pursue the legislative responsibilities i'm very proud of that there's sixty folks who are doing great work across pennsylvania and inch by inch trying to make the world a bit better while they act to c p s well that's excellent now you've been in the house since one thousand nine hundred seventy nine hundred ninety seven it's never imagined serving that long in fact i'd never imagine running for any public office it was the unusual circumstance where the gentleman who preceded me out pettitte died somewhat unexpectedly and created a special election and because of that the ordinary jockeying for position hadn't  in the community who knew my work as a c p a with government said you know you've actually succeeded in improving governance will work in the private sector maybe you should take a crack at pennsylvania and i set forth on that mission but my expectation was that if everyone was serious about fiscal responsibility it may just be a matter of no how and i could bring some know how in fact to co author one of the standard textbooks in government accounting before i selected but i've reached the unfortunate pollution that it's not and absence of know how it's really an absence of will is why we have the fiscal problems that we have well if you sit on two committees that i know of yes i'm sharing now the agriculture  bit of a green acres experience because that's not really my background but these things come through seniority pecking order but i will tell you it's been a great education for me over this past year dealing with what is pennsylvania's largest industry and most most people in peter's tasha fry don't think of it in those terms but it's an enormously broad expanse of subject matter and things that are might seem mundane but are critically important such as just the road rules about which farm vehicles can cross a public road if you're a farm and you like track farm and you get across the road well the federal government's trying to impose changes that could put a lot of farmers out of business or in fact require that they double or triple their equipment so they parked on various sides of the road instead of crossing the road so little things like that one of the things that i find out when i was really into horses was the fact that peter statut has the second or third party capita horse ownership in the country yes and that's i mean i guess that most people don't understand it's like whatever you have an antique car you don't realize how many people have them until all the sudden you pull yours out go old car cruise one of the disappointing thing about the table games legislation was that there's a significant amount of funds that were set aside in the original slots bill with the theory being it would help promote the ek wine industry in pennsylvania horses and horse farming each horse as if you were involved horses you know each morris requires a lot of investment to be maintained but what was discovered over the years since lots was approved is that the vast majority of these funds are leaving pennsylvania so in essence pennsylvania tax dollars are going to subsidize farm operations in kentucky and delaware new york and and elsewhere which makes absolutely no sense to me and whether or not we should be subsidizing the horse industry at all is a question we could talk about but we certainly shouldn't be subsidizing the horse industry in kentucky it makes no sense well they will say we're going to that's sort of segues right into one of the next questions the budget  this governor has since two thousand and two as cut a lot and talked about the use of funds from gambling and that was going to be the hedge all for everything and i got i was going to cut taxes it was going to make our highways golden and everything else in the last eight years that's been a bust absolutely was he promised a thirty percent real estate tax decrease school real estate taxes and at the time i pointed out the folly of that projection and just doing the arithmetic it made no sense there was no real anchor for and as we are here so many years later the homeowner in peter's township receives a reduction on their property taxes of about one hundred twenty five dollars a year i'm glad you said that i have a little let me see here so i hope people can call their financial advisors to to discover what they should do with this one fall and i'm i'm not being critical of sending money back what i am being critical about is that so much of the money from slots went elsewhere we mentioned the horse industry but it's gone for a new headquarters for comcast in philadelphia i guess we're going out over comcast but you know i don't right now we've maybe you will find that this program doesn't get aired as frequently as it otherwise would vision and fur on and on and on the endless list of hands that were out  and pockets that were being picked it's enormous and as a result less than half of the money from slots actually goes for property tax relief and the arithmetic was always a bit of a con job which may make sense when you hear about a gambling industry but one hundred twenty five bucks a year is not a third of anybody's property taxes actually in peter's township well this is why you said i have a slide up but i want to get down here to the main  f we can show this place the annual payment on general obligation have increased from c n n forty nine million in two thousand and two whenever governor rendell took office to nine hundred forty two million now and it's going to get worse based upon the debt which is already been floated pennsylvania now exceeds forty billion dollars in public debt and when you add the underfunded pension obligations on the state level on a local level  it's an enormous sum that is about fifteen thousand dollars per taxpaying household so i think it is an extra more general it's not as bad as the federal debt that way as it was that's what scares me is you have the state that you have the federal debt but when the local community haven't stopped that either you know we've just and township one for eleven million dollar bond issue they've raised taxes two percent the school district has raised taxes i believe is close to three percent the county has raised taxes and the problem that we have here of course is we have an antiquated tax system it is so we have to we have and the funding formulas from the state contribute to that right right so communities like peters township their total amount per student per day is less than the increase per student per day that is the school district of philadelphia or pittsburgh and consequently the local taxpayer peters township under this governor shoulder in an ever increasing share of the burden when he stands up says he wants money for education where more than half of the funds for the increase in education throughout his term have gone to philadelphia what he really wanted is money for an office well that's one of the one of the things that when i was researching one of pittsburgh was going through their bankruptcy and down twenty million dollars or something i read us an interesting story that a  previous associate was building a townhouse unit complex so you monk this thing out in philadelphia area and the state guaranteed that five hundred million dollars or something but they wouldn't guarantee the budget for pittsburgh for twenty and that's you know i said this is this is that is that to me but i'm looking at like you said the homeowners tax even here in washington county in peter's township there's two different there's two segregated organizations here there's one with folks who had homes here up assessed value of one hundred thousand dollars and they're paying a very small portion of that yes if you have one hundred thousand dollars home each tax mill goes up fifty dollars but if your home is assessed at six hundred thousand and you multiply or add the township taxes school taxes and we're not even talking and i'm going to ask you to explain the purpose and once again talking about being in a situation where the public pension fund which is going to hit here in the next two years or so if you could please explain how that is going to change the tax structure that we i mean the small tax structures comparison the pennsylvania state government and many of its local governments have what are known as defined benefit plans as these are in the days of old in the real world a lot of companies had defined benefit plans where if you work for so many years o milan you take three years of service the amount of your pay and it would provide a result but the real world started moving away from defined benefit plans twenty five years ago maybe thirty years ago and they're almost extinct in the real world pennsylvania has doggedly not only stayed with that approach but has increased the generosity of  pensions that should be expected i would also add that they have more than increased by half the amount that the individual needs to contribute but what happens is to help balance budgets the governor skipped the the normal actual wirral approach because he's government he doesn't have to follow the federal laws about funding pensions and just as the city of pittsburgh which has the highest percentage of on funded pension obligation of any minister the entire nation is in touch for is things do not happen overnight so for years i have been saying look we need to start making this transition and it may be to supreme court has ruled in pennsylvania that you cannot remove a pension promise to anyone who has had it but we could have started grandfathering in ten years ago twelve years ago this this crisis and funding which is going to hit  has been forseeable ever since i've been in the legislature it's worse than was imagined simply because the markets took a tumble and everyone knows that and everybody has that same problem but even now there isn't any concrete effort to resolve this issue and if it doesn't get resolved although i was at the governor saying well he's going to start a new tax system this year and tuck it away which we could talk about he wants new taxes on everything from toilet paper to tax preparation he wants taxes on caskets and funerals and so you know ben franklin was actually a member of the pennsylvania general assembly was something i didn't know to like till i served there he was actually voted out of office on with both death and taxes and it's the appetite for picking pockets is quite enormous and at the same time the priorities and where money is spent to me has gotten so it 's so out of whack and so removed from what the people western that's i mean it was well i have i have looked at one of the things that we talk to on every congressman murphy was here the last time we talked about immigration ok and immigration just does not hit texas and arizona and florida immigration in pennsylvania is very severe immigration to the natural populate or the growth of the natural population is less than one percent right now the growth of illegal immigration is almost thirty four percent of illegal immigration is is affects different parts of pennsylvania differently the northeast philadelphia area has a significant  population we've seen it less here in western pennsylvania which i think is actually an editorial about the way that pittsburgh and the region that's big government but it bears an enormous cost because there's the cost of education there's the cost of health care rendell has made it a priority to enroll in food stamps and other public assistance programs creasing number of people so that the before the economic crisis the number of people signed up for food stamps when the economy was going full throttle increased by several hundred thousand under governor rendell and there's been a lot of questions jack wagner did an audit of this and said that there was in most cases shoddy if any effort to establish whether or not the person being in the role will automatically receive payments was even eligible so it's not a partisan question as you remember jack wagner the democrats a lot just like the governors of democrats but jack wagner had the integrity to stand up and say this system is unrolling hundreds of thousands of people who should not be receiving public benefits and you know if they the governor's action has been since that report came out a year and a half ago nothing nothing they've not changed their systems at all or if they have they are unwilling to discuss what changes have been made the the costs that i have seen seven hundred eighty million dollars a year added to the budget for education medical and incarceration that sounds quite quite reasonable maybe low well and that's the point that i guess i'm trying to get to is when i was a governor came out and said that we are three billion dollars in debt over the last two years you know you multiply similar figure times floor and you come close to that three billion dollars why are we doing something about it the the governor who's got the executive authority to do things about it doesn't want to do things about i think it's going to be up to a new governor now hopefully that will take place  but it's time for change what's more we talk about government we talk about usually federal government and it's gone askew and we just seen those at the bank of london or the bank of england today talking about how the euro is going down t the greece crisis right and that their debt is so overburdening right now all that the rest of the european market knowledge talking about kicking greece out of the european market and not making them a part of it so let them die on their own as a war which is terrible because you know when you look back on how they got that debt a lot of it an awful lot of a couple billion came whenever they handled the olympics and so whenever you look at i had thought about well whenever you looked at their debts and when became available then it was that they tried to you know the front there their country in the olympics which is a wonderful thing but it caused them so much debt that in fact it started them on this road and which is good is comes this concerting because i use that we're talking about pennsylvania california's come up with fifty billion or so in debt that they can handle course people here you know really look at that and say well you've been given education away for years you know we've been paying for why can't you do that kind of thing these numbers get to be numbing a million a billion it's difficult for a lot of people to really distinguish because i have never had a billion of anything and you haven't either and i would guess that a way that i often offer to illustrate the order of magnitude is that if a house in minutes ago was just sixteen hours you can pretty well remember what you're doing sixteen hours ago million minutes ago it's just about two years ago and you can pretty well remember maybe not exactly a top your head what you were doing two years ago this day but you're referring to a calendar you'd remember a billion minutes ago rome was still being run by a guy named person round numbers nine hundred million dollars let's call it ability to three dollars a billion three thousand dollars per person is a trillion fourteen point five that would be fifty three thousand five hundred per person and when you realize that only about a third of americans pay income taxes that means if you're an income tax paying americans your share of the national debt is about one hundred sixty thousand dollars for every individual that's a huge amount of money and i think our neighbors have a better handle on what this federal  deficit whenever we talk about debts you know we talk about government we talk about everything for each representative ok there's approximately a half a half a million dollars spent and salaries office and everything else actually more than that it's about a million and a half of pennsylvania it's that on average and i do need to interject here and say that i have consistently and i was first elected tried to lead by example on of have the smallest legislative staff throughout just about every one of those years that i actually prefer say lima stratham smallest and also i went years and years where i just refused to accept the normal for d m z and the which is fair enough you've got to spend a night at a town's are you know that's that's business but i'd even take mileage and so forth just to make the point crystal clear to my colleagues that i there looking for purpose i was there to make a difference to bring my wisdom hopefully as a c p a my interest in the future of pennsylvania and not for all the little prizes but one of them that was really disappointing to me is that although i would be frugal with the people's money the money didn't go back to the people it stayed in the slush fund that never got turned back to the treasury so a year ago i made a motion to try to return one hundred fifty thousand dollars in for d m z in mileage that i declined over the years to try to redirect that from the slush fund to the property tax relief fund now when it all come back to peter's township certainly but at least it's going back to the people and that was the feel i'm sorry but i like are you kidding me that i'm not asking them to put their money where their mouths are i'm going to put my money the money that it would have it's fair and square for me to accept but i declined but it should go back to the taxpayers and it got voted down which is an illustration of how disconnected many legislature are from what we would expect would be normal behavior and i on that same week i made a motion to change the rules to prohibit sitting legislators from being compensated by lobbying firms while their legislator that's to say you cannot be on the payroll are you going to be a contract employee you would think that would be simple enough it passed unanimously which is the good news passion ask me in about five minutes later apparently some people realized what they had just done and the democrats moved to rescind that vote which essentially serves to erase it is still there in the journal but they pennsylvania had the shame of being the only state in the nation that had no laws at all governing lobbying not no disclosure wild wild west and candidly a lot of vested interests like that that work but i made it my mission to get a lobbying on the books i was also mindful of some of the things that the supreme court had done to knock prior laws off the books and one of those things dealt with separation of powers in the executive branch regulate the legislat branch and so i knew that i couldn't put this prohibition in a statute so i came back to make it part of the house rules it was seen to be a slam dunk and i when it passed unanimously at first i thought well that's good that means there isn't anyone here who's undertaking this bad behavior and then when all the commotion happened and it was repealed rescinded within forty minutes i thought you know that's just so tragic because  there are members who are on the payroll of lobbying firms and that's if we can't agree that that's wrong where do we were we begin with further reforms well this is this is something pennsylvania is the second highest per capita from what i understand having representatives of what one representative for about forty nine thousand people i have about sixty thousand votes as well and california cameras california has one representative for about one hundred thousand ok now you're close to one hundred thousand anyhow and this probably won't make too much of a difference but we're in a world that is taking the taxpayer to task every day yes and a world that is in fact we're getting not only hit on the local level not only on the county level not on the state level but the federal level we're bearing these people with with burdens that they can't handle and trying to pass you know my father always said he wanted me to have a better life than him and that's not going to be available to these folks it's the only frightening fork in the road is that fiscal mismanagement has gotten to the point that we're either going to face the hyperinflation that happened at the end of the seventy's to make it cheaper to pay back all these debts which destroys what the generation who's ending their working careers has accumulated and saved  scrimped and invested so it can destroy that it can also destroy the prospects for the rising generation and it's either one is not an attractive option the only attract a lot of gin to make it to contain it sticks to cut funding for public libraries it says to me he doesn't get it because that's an investment that cost relatively little and has an enormous return at the same time he never seems to be out of money to given away to people who are in private industry to build this or build that go build an ethanol plant go build a tower for the comcast etc that those are always funny money for those things not money for libraries i'm glad you had the opportunity to come in and well i think we should like you said the voters need to have some connection to their representatives you know that they need to know that somebody is actually out watching for us and as i said and these people will  witness that i pulled your voting record and if i hadn't seen you served in the military i would have supported you because of the voting record so i appreciate you bringing are you coming out today and then there are the military pain oh that's all right