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Additional energy taxes hurt Pennsylvania jobs

DAVID SPIGELMYER

Pittsburgh

Additional energy taxes will harm the Commonwealth’s ability to attract job-creating investment. As the energy market slowly rebounds, Pennsylvania is fiercely competing with other energy producing states. In fact, this paper confirmed in an editorial earlier this year that lawmakers must focus on policies that give Pennsylvania “a competitive advantage over neighboring states” as a strong energy industry will “generate employment and, ultimately, more revenue for the state.”

As this paper has written many times, Pennsylvania already taxes natural gas through the impact fee, which has generated more than $1 billion for the Commonwealth. Locally, more than $50 million from this unique tax has directly benefitted Lycoming County community projects that, as the Sun-Gazette wrote in 2016, “answer a crucial need.”

Pennsylvania’s impact tax represents a 9.16 percent effective tax rate on natural gas -nearly double West Virginia’s rate and significantly higher than all other major energy producing states.

“The message is for state leaders, regardless of political stripe,” as the Sun-Gazette wrote last year, must be to support policies that promote natural gas transportation and use, “rather than inflict a second layer of taxes, a severance tax, on the energy companies.”

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