Gov. Tom Corbett Defends State Budget

KDKA

Governor Tom Corbett, R-Pennsylvania, was in Pittsburgh today.

He started bright and early and used the nation’s oldest radio commercial radio station, NewsRadio 1020 KDKA, to talk about issues with the economy and the state budget.

“If people look at all the facts, our spending was out of control,” Corbett said. “We used every rainy day fund — anything we could to continue the spending and now the money is gone and just as people have to live on a budget the state has to live on a budget.”

Corbett spent the first hour of his day on KDKA Radio with Larry Richert and John Shumway talking to listeners.

“The best way to cure it is to grow the economy, to grow the jobs in Pennsylvania, to see businesses come to Pennsylvania,” says Corbett, “and I remind everybody one of the things hopefully we will get is that shell cracker facility. It’s a few years down the road, but that’s going to be thousands of jobs for the people of western Pennsylvania.”

“I mean tens of thousands of jobs — and that’s how you grow the economy so that you can continue to fund programs the way you’d like to fund them if you had the money.”

The governor says Pennsylvania is doing slightly better than the rest of the country when it comes to employment figures, yet his appearance comes on the heels of the release of a television ad targeting his economic policy.

“I think they’re silly,” Corbett said. “Frankly, we’re trying to protect the working class of Pennsylvania. We’re not going to increase taxes on them from the state level.

“We’ve made those promises. We have controlled spending. We have a $4.2 billion deficit that we had to deal with. I don’t have the federal money that we had to pass along to the schools that we had before I came into office that Governor Rendell did and as a result, it is a tough time.”

Read more: http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2012/06/01/gov-tom-corbett-defends-state-budget/