Category: Business and Economy
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Tax on Money Almost Revived, But Got One Year Reprieve
In this tumultuous market environment, alternative investments are proving popular. But the 2025 Virginia General Assembly came very close to foolishly returning the sales tax on some of the most popular: physical gold and silver and legal tender coins. Ending this tax on money ten years ago was the subject of one of my earliest…
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Taking a Knife to the Democrats’ Green Energy Dream
By Steve Haner Wielding irony like a razor-sharp butcher’s knife, Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) has proposed a series of amendments on bills intended to mandate renewable energy that basically reverse the impact and do just the opposite. One amendment would even repeal the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which is central to Virginia Democratic…
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Big Pharma Greed — or Low Risk Tolerance?
by James A. Bacon “All over this country, the American people are asking why it is that they pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders noted in a screed published a couple of years ago. “Why is it that nearly one out of every four adults…
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Petitions Don’t Save Beloved Businesses
by Kerry Dougherty One of my pals texted me last weekend to see if I wanted to go to a movie. There was a time when we went almost weekly, but, like many other film lovers, we got out of the habit when our idiot governor closed movie theaters during covid. Don’t get me started…
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Two Energy Updates: RGGI and an Offshore Wind Reversal
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative held its latest auction for carbon emission allowances last week and produced a price of $19.76 per ton. Because Virginia is no longer a participant, that probably saved electric utility customers another $100 million. The March 2025 price, in reality a tax on the use of hydrocarbon fuels, was lower…
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Dominion’s IRP Becoming Moot as Federal Rules Pivot
by Steve Haner The expanded use of natural gas as a fuel for electricity is the key debate in Dominion Energy Virginia’s integrated resource plan pending before the State Corporation Commission. Not waiting for the decision in that case to come later this year, the utility has now filed an application to start building the…
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The Trump Tariffs and Virginia Farmers
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Virginia farmers will soon feel the effect of President Trump’s 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on all imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent tariff on products from China. According to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer services, the top two export markets for Viriginia agricultural products in 2023…
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Embrace the Musk-alypse
by James A. Bacon From reading the news clips yesterday, one would have thought the end of the world was at hand. Gog and Magog in the form of Elon Musk and DOGE have unleashed a cascade of horrors across the Old Dominion. The Washington Post sounded the alarm: “With federal cuts looming, Northern Virginia…
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Medicaid – Again
by James C. Sherlock Featured image courtesy of Cato Institute. It is worth a close look by those who suggest there is no room for federal budget reductions. On the morning of Feb. 25th, I posted a column a week ago that asked whether Virginia should pay the full cost of Medicaid expansion. That same…
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Data Centers Escape Assembly Session Unscathed
By Steve Haner Despite great public angst and political theater, the data center industry has emerged from the 2025 General Assembly unscathed. Virginians will continue to compete with Internet and cloud customers from all over the country and the world for electricity, as the data centers continue to proliferate here. One bill dealing with the…
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Key Energy Issues of Customer Cost, Reliability Often Ignored
By Steve Haner The Virginia General Assembly has approved a long list of bills to reinforce its previous commitment to ending the use of hydrocarbon fuel in Virginia. It ignored warnings that natural gas is essential for energy security from the regional electricity marketplace, the Virginian who now chairs the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and…
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Monopoly Beer and Electric Vehicles
By Brett A. Vassey, Spoiler alert! This is not an article about a new board game, but about a game in which the Virginia General Assembly writes the rules and picks the winners. House Bill 2087 was introduced by Delegate Irene Shin, D-Fairfax. It cleared the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee on a narrow 7-6…
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Biting the Steady Hand That Lights Your House
By Steve Haner Three western Virginia politicians have penned a press release masquerading as a serious proposal. They seek to decertify a major monopoly electric utility which serves 540,000 Virginia accounts, the Appalachian Power Company, a division of American Electric Power. The letter was sent to the State Corporation Commission and then released, with…
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Battery Bills Still Charging Toward Passage
By Steve Haner The Virginia General Assembly is still poised to pass a vastly expanded mandate for future utility battery storage systems, but the bills are no longer passing unanimously. At least some discussion of the ratepayer cost impact has come up in committee and floor discussions since being raised by Bacon’s Rebellion. Most Republicans…
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The Chainsaw Cometh. Be Not Afraid, Virginia
by James A. Bacon Over at Cardinal News Dwayne Yancey makes a stab at calculating the economic impact on Virginia if President Trump and his chainsaw-wielding demiurge Elon Musk succeed in their goal of hacking down the size of the federal workforce by 60%. His concern is that two-fifths of Virginia’s personal income tax revenue…