For the past two fiscal years, Pennsylvania taxpayers have had cause for cautious optimism about the Keystone State’s financial condition for the short and longer terms, going forward.

When people don’t have health insurance — especially people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, breast cancer, high blood pressure or even pregnancy (yes, that counts) — they skip vital care, go into debt or even bankruptcy to pay bills, or simply die.

State Rep. Dawn Keefer is right. The state’s budget process should be cleaner, clearer and far more transparent. Money shouldn’t be hidden in off-the-books slush funds and legislators should make sure we spend no more than our revenues support.

We have urged the passage of a strong federal red flag law (in addition to stronger federal background checks on gun sales). But there’s no saying when or if such a law will be enacted by Congress. And so it makes sense to simultaneously push for a red flag law in Pennsylvania.

A Berks County facility that rakes in millions of federal dollars annually to function as a jailhouse for federally detained children and parents should be shut down. Today.

Any move toward a fairer form of school taxation in Pennsylvania is, well … good news.

There is a nascent movement inside the beltway that would give our nation’s states the unqualified right to decide for themselves the legal status of marijuana.

We appreciated this thought from state Sen. Mike Regan, R-York, quoted by The Associated Press: “I’d like to say there is no such thing as a bad kid. However, we all know kids do bad things.”

Three cheers for this move by the General Assembly.

Thanksgiving is here. Along with turkey and mashed potatoes, one thing can be counted on: Awkward dinner table conversations.

Alongside traffic and coffee, news radio is a staple of my morning commute. As I flip through the stations, I’ll sometimes hear a pundit lament that “Nothing is made in America anymore.”

On the National Front for this week, the AAA says gas prices are mostly cheaper across the country thanks to an increase in supply amid robust demand. A small number of states saw pump prices decrease more than a dime, though the majority saw fluctuation of a few pennies. Today’s national average of $2.59 is two cents cheaper than last week.

Pennsylvania agriculture, like American agriculture, is stressed, and our traditional safety net, exports, is greatly threatened.

For most of the past 100 years, U.S. transportation policy has been based on the users-pay/users-benefit principle. The biggest advantages of this principle are that it is fair (those who pay the fees receive the benefits), proportionate (those who use highways more would pay more), self-limiting (the tax rate is limited), predictable (consistent from year to year), and an investment signal (indicates how much infrastructure to build).

Paige Cognetti won Tuesday’s special election for Scranton mayor by overcoming what she had described as the “old-boy network” of city Democratic politics.

With presidential candidates, a governor, and even the BBC weighing in on Cherry Hill’s school lunch controversy, a suburban township long known regionally for its mall is on the global map, and not in a good way. But the firestorm the Cherry Hill school board ignited while trying to work within a state requirement to collect overdue lunch money should also spark a larger conversation about the role of school nutrition programs in lessening food insecurity as well as about the tension between public and private responsibilities for the well-being of children.

Before the spring of 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had no system in place to track migrant children who were separated from their families. That was the case even though, it now turns out, the Trump administration, in its first months in office, had already begun wrenching scores of babies, toddlers, tweens and adolescents from their parents to deter illegal border crossings. Then, beginning in April last year, the administration doubled down, systematically breaking apart migrant families upon apprehension at the border — still with no means of tracking and reuniting the families it had sundered.

The phone rings. You know who it is. No, wait. You know what it is.

Alongside traffic and coffee, news radio is a staple of my morning commute. As I flip through the stations, I’ll sometimes hear a pundit lament that “Nothing is made in America anymore.”

Millions of Pennsylvanians are paying for an outdated vehicle emissions testing program in counties that already meet federal air quality standards. As chair of the Pennsylvania Senate Transportation Committee, I believe the time to change that is long overdue.