Report: Pa's population is getting older - and less taxable - and that's a problem Monday Morning
Pennsylvania's senior citizen population is growing 20 times faster than the state's overall population.
And by 2025, one in five Pennsylvanians will be aged 65 and older, The Philadelphia Inquirer explains in new report detailing the public policy challenges those demographic challenges will pose.
That means an ever-increasing demand for such services as transportation, nursing home care, senior citizen centers and other programs. But, the report quite sensibly asks, who's going to pay for it?
That would be the ever-dwindling population of wage-earners (Pennsylvania doesn't tax retirement income, making it a haven for the 65-plus set to begin with). And with state policy geared toward catering to this disproportionately loud population, the challenges are clear.
As The Inquirer quite sensibly notes, the state faces an eroding a tax base. Citing a report by the state's Independent Fiscal Office, "wage and income taxes will become less important because retirement income is not subject to it, and the sales tax base could erode because elderly people purchase fewer taxable goods," the newspaper noted.
That may leave lawmakers, who have struggled to pass balanced (and on-time) budgets to consider the unthinkable - taxing retirement income.
http://www.pennlive.com/capitol-notebook/2018/01/report_pas_population_is_getti.html#incart_most-comments
From what I've seem from my local reps, education and state services are handled as expenses instead of investments. Living in the SE part of the state where those things are valued and people are slightly more tolerant to investing in services and infrastructure things are not so dire. My county's school district scores came back and nearly all of them were lower than the last set of scores. I don't anticipate any of my reps to "reinvest" in our children so more and more of them will leave this state for better climes when they graduate (and those that don't, will be working cheap retail jobs).
The original story requires a subscription.
= new reply since forum marked as read
You'll have all those oldster with their aching bodies lined up out the door. Nothing but old hippies in the state anyway - flashback time, man -----
