 Good morning, everybody. I am going to exercise my constitutional right to line item veto this ridiculous exercise in budget futility I'm calling on our legislators to get back to Harrisburg back to the work that they left unfinished last week In the meantime, I'm vetoing their ninety five million dollar cut to education I'm also vetoing other items that they don't pay for in their so-called budget This budget that they gave me does not balance at the same time. I'm allowing emergency funding for our schools to get out I'm also letting funding go out to our human service agencies and to our counties But this is on an emergency basis only in doing this I am expressing the outrage that all of us Pennsylvanians should feel about the garbage the Republican legislative leaders have tried to dump on us This budget is wrong for Pennsylvania and our legislators the folks we elected to serve us need to own up to this They need to do their jobs This budget is wrong for so many reasons, but let me just give you a few first It doesn't add up even with the numbers presented to me by the Republicans before they ran out of town just before the Christmas holiday This budget does not pay for itself. In fact, it leaves a half billion half billion dollar hole for this year 2015-16 and a nearly actually over a two billion dollar hole for 2016-17 next year There's a reason why the outside Rating agencies have downgraded our debt. There's a reason they've done that They're telling the world what our legislators really want to ignore and that is that our financial house is a mess Second this pretend budget doesn't make the investments approved in state government should make in things like I don't know education This exercise in stupidity actually cuts education funding by 95 million dollars compared to the draconian Corbit cuts of past years it does add a modest amount in basic education funding It's true, but then it takes out over 300 million to be used for school construction By the way before they left town our legislators also neglected to provide any funding for Penn State for Pitt For Lincoln University for Temple for the Penn School of Veterinary Science and and the budget They concocted doesn't have enough revenue to leave any room for doing anything to increase funding for our state universities over the 2014 2015 levels that's level this budget is doubly frustrating because we were so close to a reasonable one I had worked patiently and persistently with Republican leaders over the past many months to agree on a compromise budget That compromise budget was in balance That compromise budget invested in our kids it invested in our schools that compromise budget also included a deal that Led to would have led to historic pension reform would have led to historic liquor reform That compromise budget actually passed the Republican-dominated Senate by a vote of 43 to 7 and it passed the House on a number of preliminary votes then Then before the final vote the Republican House leaders told their members go home. I Get it. I get it that everybody is tired of this stalemate, but we were almost there and this makes what they did all that much More unconscionable they simply left town before finishing their job They can deny what they did they can try to justify what they did They can throw around all the political nonsense they want, but the fact remains they ran off pretty quickly at that They ran off before they finished their job and they left all of us with a real mess Let's not kid ourselves. We still need a budget. We need one that actually adds up This year. We need one that adds up next year. We need one that fully funds our schools We need one that really covers the cost of our state We need to pass the budget that the Senate and the House actually passed Senate bill 1073 I'm ready to sign it if we don't get this right We will face massive cuts to education and human services and we'll see huge increases in local taxes once again and Massive additional cuts to our local schools. Anybody remember 2011 2012. We need to get it right this time So to the legislators elected to do the people's business get back to work Get back to the work of the people get back to the work the people of Pennsylvania sent you here to do Let's all of us get back to work to finish the job. You almost finished last week