The bonds that unite Pennsylvania are being tested by increasing political, cultural and economic polarization along regional lines. This has come to a head during the ongoing budget impasse, with many conservative Republicans from rural parts of the state questioning whether rural Pennsylvania’s taxes should be used to support public transit largely in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions.

They want more money for the kinds of transportation, such as crumbling country roads, their constituents use.

In response, state Rep. Melissa Shusterman, D-Chester, has made a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek proposal to sequester Pennsylvania tax dollars by economic region, with generally poorer rural counties supporting themselves and generally richer urban counties supporting themselves. The clear message (or threat): Rural Pennsylvania would shrivel up even further were it not for the economic dynamism provided by the state’s urban centers. If rural representatives don’t want to support urban necessities, they can go it alone.

Neither of these attitudes are completely wrong, but neither are they productive. Pitting the state’s regions against one another may play for home audiences and political bases, but they deny the fundamental principle and very purpose of the state — of the commonwealth — which is its unity as a political community. That means sharing resources, compromising on policy and understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

COMMON WEALTH

Pennsylvania is one of four U.S. states, alongside Massachusetts, Virginia and Kentucky, that is officially a “commonwealth.” This designation has no practical importance, except giving Post-Gazette editorial writers an extra word to use to refer to the Keystone State.

Yet the word “commonwealth” does communicate something that “state” does not: That the people who live within Pennsylvania’s boundaries don’t just share license plates and liquor stores, but a common life, common resources, common wealth. While Pennsylvania is integrated into a national and global economy, a disproportionate amount of its production and consumption takes place entirely within the state. The success or failure of Pennsylvania’s people, communities and institutions affects fellow Pennsylvanians more than others.

Then, of course, some of the fruits of economic activity within Pennsylvania is paid as taxes to Harrisburg to administer the state’s government, which is the biggest thing Pennsylvanians share as Pennsylvanians. This government is tasked with deploying those resources, which come from all over the commonwealth, to each corner of the commonwealth in a manner that suits the needs of each geographic region, each economic sector, each demographic group. This means, necessarily, that different areas will be served in different ways and to different degrees at different moments in time

Further, Pennsylvania is large enough, and diverse enough in geography and development patterns, to be a comprehensive political community — a proper commonwealth. That is: While it depends on the federal government for many things, as part of the United States’ federal system, Pennsylvania’s well-balanced economy and urban-suburban-rural mix is, theoretically, self-sustaining. In fact, if Pennsylvania were a nation, it would be in the top 20 most productive in the world by GDP, just behind the Netherlands and just ahead of Switzerland.

COMMON DIVIDES

The regional divides that are currenting rending the commonwealth are as old as human civilization itself — but have also been exacerbated in recent years by careless politicians who have failed to properly balance their own interests, the interests of their home communities and the interests of the state as a whole.

Shusterman is correct that, for all practical purposes, Pennsylvania’s urbanized regions, even with all their flaws, significantly economically subsidize its rural communities. This isn’t just a Pennsylvania issue, nor is it only a 21st century issue — though recent consolidation of economic power has worsened it. Dense developments almost by definition punch above their weight economically: The dynamism produced by having so many people, institutions, corporations and so on all in one place is a force-multiplier for economic activity.

It is hard to imagine rural Pennsylvania ever producing as much in taxation on a per capita basis as urban Pennsylvania at any time in the foreseeable future. For instance, in 2021  Shusterman’s home county of Chester produced over $2,200 per capita in personal income taxes alone; compare that to, say, Indiana County’s $673 per capita. And this doesn’t even include other taxes that skew toward urban areas, like corporate taxes. Yet no one (except perhaps Shusterman, tongue-in-cheek) would suggest Chester should receive three times the value of state services, per capita, as Indiana.

Rural Pennsylvanians, on the other hand, also have claims against their city-dwelling peers — beginning with the simple fact of food, which is produced much more in the countryside and consumed much more in the cities. Further, the economic policies that have hollowed out small-town Pennsylvania were largely devised in and benefited America’s biggest urban centers.

COMMON GOOD

Yet this game of comparisons and recriminations does nothing to help anyone right now. The purpose of state politics is to seek the common good of this particular political community — the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania — and that means balancing the wants and needs of its constituent parts with the good of the whole.

Today, that means finding a way to sustain public transit across the state, because while it many benefit Philadelphia and Pittsburgh most, the dynamism generated by effective transit emanates outward from these urbanized regions in terms of population growth, economic activity and ultimately tax dollars that can be plowed back into all of Pennsylvania.

Neither locking up this funding due to regional grievances nor threatening to immiserate entire communities because of the intransigence of their elected officials serves this commonwealth. The ongoing budget impasse is yet another grave failure of governance — a failure to think as Pennsylvanians rather than as partisans, whether of an ideology or a party or a region.

Pennsylvania will only be a well-run state when its leaders treat it like a commonwealth.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via TNS