Category: Government Finance
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Demanding Openness about UVa’s Cost Structure
by James A. Bacon Last week the University of Virginia Board of Visitors held a workshop to discuss next year’s increase in tuition, fees, and other charges and to hear input from the public — mostly students begging the board for relief from the ever-escalating cost of attendance. A PowerPoint presentation released at the meeting…
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More Money, Same Level of Service
By Dick Hall-Sizemore There are often cries of anguish or outrage on this blog and elsewhere over the increases in spending proposed in budget proposals and then authorized by the General Assembly. Some of this criticism of increased spending is justified, but, sometimes, the increase is the result of circumstances beyond an agency’s control. Sometimes,…
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What Texas’s Crisis Means for Virginia
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in Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technologyby Peter Galuszka The Texas freeze and ensuing energy disaster has clear lessons for Virginia as it sorts out its energy future. Yet much of the media coverage in Virginia and certainly on Bacon’s Rebellion conveniently leaves out pertinent observations. The statewide freeze in Texas completely fouled up the entire energy infrastructure as natural gas…
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Updates: PPP, PIPP, Dominion’s School Buses
by Steve Haner Tax on Paycheck Protection Program Grants The General Assembly session deadlines require final decisions on various revenue bills before the final budget bill is adopted, in theory keeping the two issues separate. What is good tax policy should not be driven by the need or greed of the appropriators.
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A Really Sweet Valentine
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Governor Northam recently gave the budget conferees a $730 million Valentine. Based on January’s revenue report and year-to-date collections, the Governor has revised the general fund forecast to include an additional $410 million in FY 2021 and $320 million in FY 2022. The main factor leading to the increase was the unanticipated…
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The Latest Federal COVID Money Pot
By Dick Hall-Sizemore The federal COVID money keeps rolling into the Commonwealth. According to the Secretary of Finance, as of January 13, it was estimated that the state would receive $2.4 billion from the stimulus bill passed by Congress in late December (the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA)). Unlike the earlier COVID…
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How the CARES Funding is Being Allocated
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Upon Jim Bacon’s suggestion, Jim Sherlock and I have taken on the task of looking closer at the federal COVID money that is coming the Commonwealth’s way and trying to discern how it is being spent. Unfortunately, this is not an analysis one finds in the general news media. We have taken…
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Senate Taxes Less PPP, House Bill Almost All
by Steve Haner First published this yesterday by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Majorities in both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly agree with Governor Ralph Northam and have voted to tax the federal Payroll Protection Plan grants that saved Virginia jobs in the pandemic. They only remain at odds over how much…
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Federal COVID Funding to Virginia K-12 Schools
by James C. Sherlock The federal government allocated a great deal of money in each of two different pieces of legislation in 2020 to provide COVID-related relief to K-12 schools. I will endeavor here to explain briefly what that means to Virginia. The two pieces of 2020 federal legislation that provide funding to K-12 schools…
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Unlikely to Go Well – Unimaginable Amounts of COVID-Related Money and the Rush to Spend It
by James C. Sherlock The federal government is charged to distribute $7 trillion in supplemental COVID-related supplemental funding already appropriated or pending. Real money, and we will have borrowed every penny. Hard to comprehend that much money. That is 7 million million dollars. I will try here to reduce that to human scale. At full…
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State Tax on PPP Grants Reduced Only Slightly
by Steve Haner A Senate Committee voted today to reduce the amount of tax that Virginia will impose on the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) grants that saved Virginia jobs, but not by much. It remains clear many legislators think employers owe Virginia tax on those dollars. Declining to tax the entire amount is being packaged…
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Virginia K-12 Spending Trends
Teachers and other self-proclaimed school advocates in Richmond plan to assemble on a footbridge over the Bellevue Overpass this evening and hold up giant electrified letters spelling out “Fund Our Schools.” It’s a clever media ploy that will guarantee great visuals for photographers and television crews, and undoubtedly it will gin up lots of uncritical…
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Is Virginia a Low Tax State? It Depends on What You Measure.
by James A. Bacon The Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission has updated its scoreboard comparing Virginia on key metrics to other states — a project championed by Sen. Tim Kaine when he was governor. The idea was to allow Virginians to track the progress of the commonwealth in comparison to peer states on the…
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PPP Tax May Focus on Larger Employers Only
by Steve Haner A week ago, Governor Ralph Northam’s Administration was adamant that it would be unfair, in fact a double tax benefit, to allow Virginia employers with forgiven Paycheck Protection Plan loans to also deduct any expenses used to qualify for forgiveness. This week, the position changed. Maybe it would make sense to allow it…
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Proposed Standards of Quality Changes and Their Fiscal Impact
by James C. Sherlock This essay will present the changes proposed to Virginia public school Standards of Quality proposed by the Board of Education and put forward in identical School Equity and Staffing Act bills in the General Assembly. They represent very significant change. I have annotated each change in law in that bill…