Category: Government Finance
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A Little Perspective on the Federal Budget Debate
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There has been much commentary on this blog lately about the size of the national debt and the need to cut federal spending. Many of those commenters point fingers at Democrats as being the big spendthrifts. I would like to add a little perspective to this discussion. When reading the obituary for…
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UVA Board Members Call for Tuition Freeze
by James A. Bacon Members of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors expressed strong reservations about the tuition increases approved in December and asked for a special meeting with administrators to dig deeper into the university’s finances. No formal action was taken, but Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis told Bacon’s Rebellion during a break…
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Mark Warner Amends
And he’s right to do so. by Gordon C. Morse Around 12:30 p.m. today, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, appeared on MSNBC with Katy Tur to discuss President Trump’s address last night before Congress and a telling moment emerged mid-way through the conversation. Warner has hit his stride in recent years as a member of…
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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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Medicaid Expansion Costs in Virginia – Who Should Pay?
by James C. Sherlock Update Feb 26 at 13:02: See here for article on potential Medicaid cuts. Ronald Reagan was wrong, yet somewhere he is smiling. “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on…
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First the James River, Now Federal Grants
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Last week, the James River froze over and folks were walking across the river on the ice. This week, Virginians were confronted with another freeze. The Trump administration ordered federal agencies on Monday to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance….” The purpose of the…
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No Psychic Needed To Predict Tax Issue Gridlock
By Steve Haner The largest item among Governor Glenn Youngkin’s many proposed changes to the Virginia state budget is his idea to set aside $1.1 billion from last year’s surplus revenue to cover three years of future car tax rebates. You don’t need to call the California Psychics who run ads on Richmond’s conservative radio…
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One Way to Get Higher Ed to Cut Expenses
Many participants on this blog will welcome a provision Governor Youngkin included in his proposed budget bill that has received little notice in the press: a cap on college tuition and fees for Virginia students. The provision would impose an absolute cap for FY 2026 and limit increases in succeeding years to 2.5 percent or…
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Another Reason to Avoid the Virginia Lottery
by Dick Hall-Sizemore One of the top selling points made for approval of the establishment of the Virginia Lottery was that lottery profits would be dedicated to public education in Virginia. That is still the message that the Virginia Lottery peddles. Scroll to the bottom of its website home page, past all the current offerings,…
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Mark Warner: DNC Parrot
by Kerry Dougherty One thing you can say about Sen. Mark Warner: The man knows how to parrot DNC talking points. Virginia’s beta senator was busy yesterday. No, not trying to get his fellow Democrats in the House to sign on to a clean continuing resolution that would fund disaster relief and the military for…
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Gov. Youngkin’s Priorities Shared by Jefferson Institute
By Derrick Max Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) presented his budget amendments to the the legislature’s money committees yesterday. The speech was filled with budget amendments to reduce taxes and fund new or existing programs. These tax cuts and additional spending proposals were made possible by Secretary of Finance Stephen E. Cummings’ report that the Commonwealth was…
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A Nonsensical Proposal
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Governor Youngkin has taken on the car tax again, sorta. Rather than attack it directly, he proposes a Rube Goldberg process for some Virginians to get some relief from the car tax. Here is how it would work: Individual taxpayers with a federal AGI of $50,000 or less would get a refundable…
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Will Helicopter Dollars Improve Virginia Schools?
by James A. Bacon Governor Glenn Youngkin is dumping money into Virginia’s public education system like a liberal Democrat. He’s not putting the funds to work in the quite same way — there’s more for accountability measures and Lab School Partnerships — but it’s hard to see a big difference. I don’t know if he’s…
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Is Newer Necessarily Better?
by James A. Bacon Governor Glenn Youngkin will propose $290 million in extra funding for new public-school construction in the 2025-26 fiscal year, the Governor’s Office announced yesterday. That will bring the total amount of construction dollars in the biennial budget to $700 million, and the total allocated since Youngkin took office in January 2022…