Corbett remains adamant on cuts, no new taxes

    Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett came to Philadelphia for a conversation Tuesday. The state’s chief executive spoke on a number of issues.

    He touched on the current massive cuts in the state budget.

    “Nobody wants to cut and anybody who thinks it was easy for me to go in there and cut, they are mistaken,” said the governor. “I’ve seen the pictures of me as Darth Vader and all of those pictures of me. We didn’t want to cut, but we had to get the spending down.”

    He spoke about how to deal with the cuts to education funding and his no-new-taxes pledge.

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    “I keep my word, we are not going to create any new taxes,” he said. “We have to make Pennsylvania competitive … we have not been competitive.”

    And he addressed the need to build business in order to create jobs.

    “The first thing we can do is make Pennsylvania business friendly, get our budget under control, get our tax structure under control and we are working on that,” Corbett said, adding that state officials need to “get our regulatory structure under control so that we will be partners, not adversaries, of business and grow business.”

    The governor said schools and universities, among others, are going to have to deal with cuts.

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