The Pennsylvania legislature has yet to pass a budget for this fiscal year. With a Democratic governor and a GOP-dominated legislature, we have a form of gridlock in Harrisburg that mirrors the disfunction in Washington. For those who don’t know much about the Keystone State, James Carville famously described it this way: Philly in the east, Pittsburgh in the West, and Alabama in the middle. Electorally, Pennsylvania looks like a sea of red with two small peninsulas jutting out from the southeast and southwest.

My state representative Steven McCarter, a Democrat, announced a town hall meeting last week to present his version of events. No surprise, McCarter laid much of the blame for the stalemate on the opposing party, and indeed, the GOP has held quite firm on its pledges of not raising or creating new taxes. The room of nodding heads expressed their various vexations at these developments, agreeing with Representative McCarter that only new taxes could settle this budget impasse.