Tax the Frackers? Sorry, Done That!
The severance tax proposed by Gov. Tom Wolf is a very bad idea, says Rep. Stephen Bloom and ignores the reality that we’re already “taxing the frackers.”
Over the past six years, communities throughout our Commonwealth have been reenergized. Once desolate main streets now gush with commerce. Struggling small businesses— the family-owned corner store and the auto repair shop just off the square —thrive again, and new enterprises keep bubbling up. An economic miracle has put families back to work and pumped jobs and hope to residents who hadn’t tasted the opportunity for prosperity in generations.
The transformation flows from the remarkable ascendance of the world’s cleanest burning fossil fuel, natural gas. Here in Pennsylvania, natural gas production is growing faster than anywhere in the country, with safe Marcellus Shale wells now producing nearly one-fifth of the nation’s vital natural gas supply. And this unexpected emergence of abundant homegrown energy via hydraulic fracturing technology (“fracking”) is now replacing America’s shaky historical dependence on foreign dictators and tyrannical oil despots with the permanent security of self-reliance and lower prices.
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