Rendell: Cuts Needed But Not So Deep

Governor Ed Rendell says he's preparing to announce an additional "400 to 500 million dollars" worth of cuts to the budget he proposed earlier this year. As May turned to June and the budget deadline has started creeping closer, members of both parties have amped up the rhetoric on how to address a likely 3.2 billion dollar revenue gap. While speaking to reporters this week Rendell offered a conciliatory note. He says despite his misgivings about the budget recently passed by Senate Republicans, GOP lawmakers are doing the right thing in looking for ways to cut spending. “They're absolutely right about that. I think they obviously went overboard and cut some of the wrong things and made some of the cuts a bit too severe. But they're absolutely right. We've got to cut first before we look at anything else. So that process is what we're working on right now,” says Rendell. The Governor says he'll trim up to a half billion dollars off the 29 billion dollar spending plan he put forward earlier this year. He says he's still viewing any sort of broad-based tax increase as a "last resort," and that lawmakers will have a better idea what the final budget will look like by the third or fourth week in June.