There’s a troubling contention in a local newspaper editorial that the City of Pittsburgh must raise taxes to extricate itself from its deep and growing financial mess.
Per the editorial:
“The unavoidable fact is this: After squandering the historic federal pandemic relief windfall and surpluses generated during the Peduto administration, Pittsburgh is spending a lot more money than it’s taking in. Therefore, due both to structural challenges and budget decisions made during the Gainey administration, it is very likely the city will have to seek additional revenues.
“That is: A tax hike is coming. The only questions are what form it will take, and which mayor will own it. We believe it’s only fair for Mr. Gainey or, failing that, City Council to propose a realistic tax increase before the end of this year, for the 2026 fiscal year.”
Ah, yes, let us yet again attempt to tax our way back to prosperity, eh? No thanks.
Now, to be fair, the local editorial does call for economy:
“Council must insist on a realistic budget from the mayor — unlike this year’s farce — including cuts to spending and enhanced revenues. That will be a hard budget to pass, but anything else would reward Mr. Gainey’s mismanagement.
“Worse, not to do so would only delay facing a problem that will not go away and will only get worse. The future of the city demands action now.”
Indeed, it does.
The generalized theory espoused here is that the city has a plethora of structural overspending problems. Again, it does. And the editorial correctly calls that “fiscal profligacy.”
So, raise taxes? Call that government-directed municipal suicide. For that would only embolden more profligacy and encourage already over-taxed, over-regulated and over-over-lorded residents to flee.
But, but, but the over-taxers, over-regulators and over-over-lorders protest that services, in general, and services for the poor, in particular, will have to be cut if taxes can’t be raised.
Perhaps the usual suspects, in a succession of “progressive” mayoral administrations, aided and abetted by the same genre of several iterations of “enlightened” city councilors, should have thought of all this when they turned the mismanagement of Pittsburgh’s finances into a cheap dogs playing poker on velvet art form.
It was in another era, in the early 20th century, that Harvard political economy professor William Z. Ripley criticized powerful corporate interests of the day for allegedly engaging in “double-shuffling, honey-fugling, hornswoggling and skullduggery.”
Fast-forward to 2025 in Pittsburgh. While even reasonable people might allege city leaders resemble those descriptives, we think that’s giving them too much credit. After all, time after time, on public policy issue after public policy issue, too many city leaders have exhibited the most, and worst, combination of ignorance and hubris.
The only way the City of Pittsburgh can right its badly listing economic ship is to right-size government across the board while holding the line on taxes.
Otherwise, residential and business flight by the over-taxed and over-regulated will leave fewer and fewer people and entities to pay the bills and leave Pittsburgh as a ghost-town monument to perpetually doing the wrong things.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
