Pennsylvania House Speaker Mike Turzai was the recipient of a pair of interesting letters this month, dated July 10 and July 18.

 
The first letter came from the office of state Rep. Gene DiGirolamo. The Bucks County Republican signed it, as did 14 other reps, Republican and Democrat.

 
They urged the speaker to bring to a vote a severance tax on the extraction of shale natural gas.

 
“It’s time to allow a shale tax vote to proceed,” the letter said, citing “the commonwealth’s dire fiscal picture,” what it claimed to be “the overwhelming support for such a tax amongst Pennsylvania’s citizens, and the bipartisan support this tax receives in the Legislature.”

 
Then came this telling passage:

 
“The Legislature simply cannot borrow its way out of Pennsylvania’s fiscal crisis, setting the commonwealth up for a litany of future financial problems. While an extraction tax would not solve all our budgetary issues, it is a crucial step toward putting Pennsylvania on the road to fiscal health.”

 
One of the wags with whom this scrivener regularly converses referred to this mindset as “progressive mind flatulence.” And it’s a characterization difficult to argue with. For what these legislators actually believe is that Pennsylvania can tax its way to prosperity.

 
To be fair, the letter also tells Turzai that “We should solicit input from industry partners, ensuring that we do not overburden important job creators.”

 
But the simple fact of the matter is that Pennsylvania’s shale gas industry already carries a significant tax burden, not only paying the kinds of business taxes that others pay but also paying an impact fee that has generated more than a billion dollars for local governments.

 
Which leads to the second letter received by the House speaker eight days later. It came from David Spigelmyer, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the trade group representing the industry and a steadfast opponent of additional shale gas taxation.

 
He hits DiGirolamo & Co. for conveniently not mentioning the impact fee in its letter and lays out a few claims of its own. Among them that, in 2016, “the tax on drillers was the equivalent of a 9.16 percent tax on production, translating into the highest effective rate of any state in the country that imposes a tax on drilling activity.”

 
Spigelmyer says Pennsylvania’s impact fee generated more revenue last year “than the severance tax collections did in Ohio, West Virginia, Colorado and Arkansas combined.”
After repeating the already well-documented existing impediments to working the Keystone State’s shale play – namely a horrendous regulatory bottleneck that has cost the state’s economy dearly – Spigelmyer concludes thusly:

 
“Politically expedient policies that harm job creators, small business and consumers of natural gas are the problem, not the answer to an economically robust commonwealth.

 
“Rather, we need policies that foster production investment, facilitate efficient buildout of our infrastructure, and encourage and attract unprecedented manufacturing opportunities that are presented with the use and development of the most affordable and abundant energy resource in the world – natural gas.”

 
Fundamental economics are at the core of these dueling letters to Turzai.

 
One side sees great riches from plucking bare the goose that lays the golden eggs, unable to understand how a goose so plucked will die. And dead geese produce no eggs, golden or otherwise

 
The other side fights for survival in an industry with thin margins, depressed prices and fierce competition, already taxed in excess of other industries and left to scratch its head when government types can’t seem to fathom that the more you tax something, the less you get of it.

 
“Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many, many more that are superfluous,” wrote C.C. Colton in 1820’s “Lacon.”

 
Simply put, it’s past time in this shale gas severance tax debate to cast off the superfluous “logic” of the tax-ourselves-to-prosperity crowd and to embrace the useful instrument of sound economics.

 
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).