In case we forgot that 2018 is an important election year, all we needed to do was to hear Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget proposal for the 2018-19 fiscal year that starts July 1.

Wolf unveiled the tame document during an 18-minute address to members of the state General Assembly on Tuesday. As far as Republicans, who control both houses of the Legislature are concerned, the good news is that Wolf is proposing no increases in the two major broad-based taxes — income and sales.

The bad news, they say, is that he is calling on legislators to adopt a new severance tax on natural gas production, which Wolf believes will raise $250 million. Republican leaders say this proposal is dead in the water, just as it has been in each of the three previous years Wolf has proposed it.

Wolf admitted that getting a Marcellus Shale extraction tax passed might not exactly be on a par with pushing a camel through the eye of a needle, but, hey, close enough. In fact, during his address, Wolf admitted, “Look, I get it. The oil and gas industry, they’re powerful. As rich as our commonwealth is in some natural resources, special interests have put political courage in short supply.”

With all 203 members of the state House and 25 of the 50 state Senate seats up for election this year, there is no stomach for any tax increase, so Wolf was careful not to give Republicans a built-in campaign issue by proposing a major tax increase. After all, Wolf himself is up for re-election this year, and he does not want to suffer the same fate his predecessor did.

Republican Tom Corbett, whom Wolf defeated in 2014, became the first Pennsylvania governor in modern history not re-elected when he sought a second term. Our governors have a two-term limit.

With this proposed budget of $33 billion, or about a 3 percent increase over the current year’s, Wolf said working with Republican legislators will be easier than in years past because together they had “begun to tame the fiscal beast that haunts Harrisburg.”

Unfortunately, there is still an unbelievable amount of pie-in-the-sky optimism about how a balanced budget will emerge from these numbers. In the past, there has been borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, transfers of funds in and out of accounts and ultra-rosy revenue projections which never had a prayer right from the beginning. This budget engages in some of this sleight-of-hand gamesmanship, too.

Wolf projects no deficit in his proposal, but analysts believe that there is no way that last fall’s revenue projections will meet expectations.

You may recall that even though the spending part of this year’s budget was passed nearly on time by the June 30, 2017, deadline; the revenue part of the budget wasn’t approved until nearly four months later and relied on a major expansion of gambling and borrowing $1.5 billion to make the numbers come together.

This year’s proposed budget would further expand lottery games, approved by legislators last fall, by allowing keno and virtual sports games in bars and online lottery games.

One thing we adamantly opposed when it was first proposed last year and which is back in Wolf’s budget for this year is his request for municipalities to pay $25 a person for state police coverage in those municipalities without their own police forces.

Republicans, many of whom represent rural districts where state police coverage is prevalent because municipalities do not have the money to establish and maintain their own forces, opposed the plan last year and are expected to do the same this year, even though Wolf is counting on this line item to contribute $63 million on the revenue side. Republicans have been equally resistant to Wolf’s prior call to raise the minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour. This year, he is asking the legislators to boost it to $12 an hour, which, he says, will save about $100 million in social and human services costs by making families more self-sufficient.

Taking a page from President Donald Trump’s playbook during his State of the Union speech last week, Wolf called for a unified approach to the state’s issues by working together with the heavily Republican General Assembly.

Even though the voters chose a Democratic governor and a Republican Legislature in 2014, Wolf said, “they expected much more from their government. They expected all of us to find ways to work together for Pennsylvania — and they expected us to deliver results.”

Wolf emphasized the times when he and the legislators saw eye-to-eye on major issues, such as the opioid crisis. “In the time I’ve been here, I’ve seen people in this Legislature — even people I disagree with about pretty much everything — set politics aside to do what’s right. I believe you have it in you to do it again. Pennsylvania is counting on you to do it again.”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com