We learned some good things.

We learned that Mayor Nutter is not the complete ideologue he often seemed to be while in Council, on the issue of business taxes. Then he tried to mandate into law the complete abolition of the main business tax, the BPT. He did this repeatedly and relentlessly, and fortunately he failed. Now, in his first budget as Mayor, he proposed much more moderate BPT cuts, abolishing the gross receipts portion over 8 years, and cutting the net income portion by 12% over the same period of time.

Even more encouraging, when the Mayor learned that the City had a revenue problem due to the recession, he proposed that Council slow the BPT cuts even more. Council followed his recommendation, so now it will take ten years to reach the Mayor’s target, rather than the 8 years he initially suggested.

It looks like the whole tax package will be voted on by City Council tomorrow. The deal that's been cut will apparently slow the elimination of the gross receipts tax to a 10 rather than 8 year timetable, and also slow cuts to the net income portion of the BPT. To accomplish that, and offer various goodies to Councilmembers, the Mayor will apparently spend down virtually the entire City fund balance now at approximately $200 million.

The other economy the Mayor is more than willing to make is to ditch the one part of the tax code that makes it marginally progressive, the wage tax rebate program pushed through by the late Councilman David Cohen at the end of his life. In deference to Councilmembers who chafe at voting for outright repeal, the Mayor is apparently proposing a one year postponement. That's a tactic that has already been used twice. If Council goes for it again, that will be a signal that it intends to let it slide forever into infinity. It is pretty outrageous that on a day that Nutter made it a point to appear at a press conference with John Edwards lauding an effort to fight poverty by, among other things, expanding the earned income tax credit, he is pushing an effort to deep six its Philly equivalent. While pushing tax cuts for Ford, Apple, Budweiser and most of the rest of the Fortune 500.

Wilson Goode is rumored to be unwilling to let this go without a fight. If you think it plainly immoral to let working people hang while giving tax breaks to multinational corporations, call your Councilperson now, and let them know. And, if this is really getting to you, come to Council tomorrow at 9:30 or so, and pigeonhole your favorite representative for a few moments while they still have a chance to do the right thing.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize awarded for callous stupidity, the Inquirer came up with a runaway winner in its Sunday editorial on City tax cuts.

As far as the idiotorial (sic?) is concerned, the Business Privilege tax cuts proposed by the Mayor in his budget simply must be enacted. Nevertheless, and horror of horrors, it seems that “there is some talk at City Hall of halting the tax cuts.” Imagine! People talk of such things! At City Hall!

Yes, the Inkies admit, “Nutter and Council need to plug holes in the budget that opened in recent weeks.” Yes, the Nutter budget proposed “smart new investments that should be retained in some form – for police and fire protection, parks, the community college, and more.”

Neighborhood Networks Conference "Getting Out the Progressive Vote in 2008 and Beyond" is tomorrow at Drexel's Disque Hall. Go here to register: http://www.phillynn.org/conference/conf.html or, if you're an impulse person, just come on down when that impulse strikes you tomorrow morning.

Why should you come? There are many reasons. But here I'll concentrate on our all-star lineup of speakers, to wit:

Mayor Nutter
Seth Williams
Anne Dicker
Tony Payton
Jesse Brown
Arshad Hasan, National Director, Democracy for America
Rodnie Jamison
Daniel Hunter, Founder, Casino-Free Philadelphia

There is a fee for attendance, but no one will be turned away. Oh, and btw, if you come, you'll learn a lot about how to organize your neighborhood as well. Don't you want to do that? I bet you do.

Why, you ask? Because the Mayor, Seth and Anne are all going to be lead speakers at Neighborhood Networks' "Getting Out the Progressive Vote" Conference at that place and on that date. Attending is easy. NN will provide a low cost continental breakfast and box lunch. All you have to do is go to NN's website at phillynn.org., register right there online, and then come to Drexel on the 29th.

This Conference is important not only for the perspective we'll get from Philly's present and future leaders. That will be great to have. But this will not be just a listening Conference; we've got serious business to do in turning this country around, and we're going to get right to that work on March 29.

Democrats are engaged in a pitched battle in PA right now to determine who our Presidential nominee will be. But the main thing we all have to worry about is keeping George John McBush's finger away from the trigger, his veto pen in his pocket, and his nominees off the Supreme Court. And, of course, the only way to do that is to beat him in November. Our special assignment, if we choose to accept it, is to beat him in Pennsylvania. If we don't succeed in that mission, he will be President, no matter what happens in the April 22 primary here, or in Ohio or Florida or Michigan at any time. It's as simple as that.

Neighborhood Networks is holding two candidate forums tonight for candidates running in the Spring primary. The first will be from 6-8 PM at Center in the Park in Germantown (at Vernon Park, just north of Chelten Avenue off of Germantown Avenue) and will feature candidates running in the 198th legislative District covering parts of Germantown, Mt. Airy and Chestnut Hill. Rosita Youngblood, the incumbent, and challengers Byron Davis and Arthur Barlow have been invited to speak. Byron Davis' has filled out NN's candidate questionnaire which you can find here: http://www.phillynn.org/elections/default.php?a=candidates

City Council deliberates on the Mayor's proposed budget every year in a tedious, but important, hearing process that stretches out over two months. This year's hearings begin on Tuesday, February 26 with a look at the proposed Five Year Plan. On Wednesday, Council will take up the tax bills that have been introduced, including the proposed changes in the BPT and the wage tax. The following week there will be a hearing on the capital budget. After that, each week for the following six weeks (with a one week break) all the City Departments will appear, one after the other, to make their cases for whatever it is that the Mayor wants for these Departments. The last of the scheduled hearings is to take place April 15. Two weeks later it will be the turn of the School District, whose leaders will testify on April 28 and 29.

I've been wrestling with the Mayor's new budget for a few days now. One thing I've figured out; it's not right to think about it in terms of what should reasonably be expected from Michael Nutter. In that framework I might be relatively pleased; when he was a Council member he worked hard to abolish the Business Privilege Tax in toto; now he proposes abolishing "only" the Gross Receipts part. Furthermore, he proposes to cut the rate of the Net Income portion of the BPT just 7%. Neither the Gross Receipts abolition, nor the Net Income cut is immediate; they would both be phased in over a period of years. And Nutter is also proposing an immediate 25% increase in the Parking Tax -- a relatively progressive tax -- which will make up a substantial part of the lost BPT revenue.

So as someone who thinks cutting business taxes should be a very low priority, if one at all, I could feel OK about all this compared to what might have been.

But personalizing the budget proposal is the wrong approach. The important question is not how to grade Nutter. The important question is this: are the choices the Mayor made in the budget the right ones for our City? My answer to that has got to be no.

Council should be improved next term with the addition of Maria Quinones Sanches, and Curtis Jones. But there's a chance to improve it still more, by electing Jesse Brown in the 8th Councilmanic District on Tuesday. Brown has been picking up steam in the last ten days, garnering the endorsements of both the Daily News and the Inquirer. In light of those endorsements, one of Brown's opponents, Jim Foster, has dropped out, calling on his backers to support Brown as the most viable candidate in the race against incumbent Donna Reed Miller. From the start Jesse has had the support of Irv Ackelsberg, YPP's endorsed candidate in last May's primary election.

Anyone who's read anything I've written on this blog the last several weeks knows I'm supporting Fattah for Mayor. There's now a big push on, however, to rally around Mike Nutter as the only candidate that can stop Knox. If the other candidates had qualities that were roughly similar, I'd be happy to join the bandwagon. But to me Fattah is miles ahead of the others. So I thought it would be useful, at this point in time, to recap why I think so.

I’m putting up this blog just to clarify the record regarding Mike Nutter’s record on the BPT. From time to time posters have suggested that Nutter didn’t really push repeal of the tax. So without getting back into the pros and cons of whether repeal is a good idea, I just wanted to get the facts out.

Nutter introduced 3 bills to repeal the BPT, (although he was quoted in a Daily News article in June 2006 as claiming 4. Either he was just bragging, the DN misquoted him, or I missed a bill.)

If this were Philadelphia Mississippi, we would be declaring a state of moral emergency.

There’s an interesting discussion going on right now onsite about identity politics and its importance. Interestingly, in that discussion there’s no mention that there’s only candidate who has put together a comprehensive program to advance the rights and needs of women, and that’s Fattah. And it’s pretty well thought out, without promising more than a mayor can reasonably deliver.

Here’s the essence of Fattah’s program for women:

A detailed Domestic Violence agenda, including more shelter space for women with children when there’s a risk of domestic violence, domestic violence counselors at Family Court, and use of technology to have protection of abuse hearings conducted from hospitals;

A commitment to support women for elected office and for appointment to senior policy-making positions in his Administration.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, and one of the most liberal members of Congress. He has been pushing the idea of a “Grand Bargain” between labor and business that would have labor agree to more liberalized trade deals in exchange for business agreeing to instant card check elections which would make it much easier for unions to organize U.S. workers.

I doubt I support Frank’s Grand Bargain but it’s been getting me thinking about whether a similar one might be possible in Philadelphia. My interest in this idea leapfrogged today when I read the Daily News series of articles detailing the close connection between jobs and crime. We all know about this, of course, but a couple of things stood out in this report: the fact that, according to Ed Schwartz, more than 40% of the City’s budget deals with crime and its consequences, and that the Chamber of Commerce has some small apprentice programs for at risk youth. Now if funding was greatly expanded for those programs and the City could make a significant cut in expenditures for law enforcement, voila: a formula for cutting taxes!

What ethics means to me.

Writers on this site have been properly concerned with the ethics proposals of candidates for Council and Mayor. They want to know how these candidates are going to shut down the pay-to-play culture of our government, and regulate elections so that the power of money is replaced by the power of voters.

But there are other measures of a candidate’s ethics that we may not be paying enough attention to. For instance, how ethical is it for a candidate to propose tens of millions of dollars of spending, while simultaneously proposing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax cuts.

I’m not raising this to rehash all the arguments pro and con relating to the merits of business privilege tax cutting. But I do think that the stand that candidates take on that idea says more about them than their policy views. It also states how seriously they take their obligation to be straight with the electorate.