Bacon's Rebellion

  • Flyover Country’s Budget Dilemma

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Dwayne Yancey, founding editor of Cardinal News, may be the most prolific purveyor of commentary in the Old Dominion (although I try to give him a run for his money). He loves making deep dives into the data. He’s often insightful and his tone is always reasonable. I do quibble, however, with the way he has framed his commentary today.

    “Those of us who live in rural areas like to think of ourselves as independent and self-reliant,” he writes. Ironically, the data show that rural American communities are among the most dependent in the country upon government transfer payments.

    Yancey is too stout of an advocate of rural/western Virginia interests to draw the same conclusion that some of our friends on the left do: that such dependence marks residents of “red” flyover country as hypocrites. He notes correctly that the dependence upon federal largesse reflects the fact that rural populations are older than suburban/urban populations and, therefore, a higher percentage qualifies for Social Security and Medicare — which, I might add, they have been paying into their entire lives.

    “This isn’t a case of lazy, shiftless Americans milking the system so they can live on the dole, the classic tale of the “welfare queen,” Yancey says.

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  • Index Taxes for Inflation Before Raising Legislator Pay for Inflation

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    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    Only part of the story, the part that best justifies a big pay increase.

    The Virginia General Assembly is maneuvering to raise its own pay to adjust for decades of inflation. To do so without showing similar consideration for the impact of inflation on Virginia taxpayers should be cause for a voter revolt. 

    No tax code indexing, no pay raise.   

    To its credit, the staff at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) has been fair in noting the impact of inflation on Virginia’s frozen tax provisions and bracket amounts, as well as on the frozen legislative salaries. It focused on the tax code first, before producing this week’s report on legislative compensation.  

    The report recommended the first pay raise since 1988 and was reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as the conclusion of a fiscal “watchdog.” JLARC is a creature of the legislature, producing a report commissioned by a legislative resolution. The legislators who sit on it, with Democrats now in the majority, cannot hide behind their hired staff on this one.  

    The report and its accompanying slide deck are short and worthy of review.  Most people are aware that legislators are paid a salary, but JLARC gets into the details of the full compensation General Assembly members receive for their services. To borrow a phrase from the Bard, there is no reason to sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the poverty of legislators. Quite the contrary. 

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  • Is Newer Necessarily Better?

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Bing Image Creator

    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 to nearly $2 billion.

    Naturally, the Virginia Education Association says that’s not nearly enough. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, VEA President Carol Bauer said years of underinvestment and inflation mean the backlog of new school construction is increasing about $1 billion yearly. The governor’s one-time funding proposal, she said, “doesn’t even keep pace with the annual growth of our backlog, let alone make meaningful progress in reducing it.”

    Moral of the story: No amount of money is ever enough. The education lobby always wants more.

    No one is asking some basic questions: Could school districts extend the lives of existing buildings by spending more on maintenance? Do new schools even improve academic achievement? If not, what’s the need for them? Could money be spent better in other ways?

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  • Shed a Tear for Virginia’s Poor, Persecuted Antisemites

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: NBC via YouTube

    by James A. Bacon

    George Mason University has issued No Trespass Orders against two leaders of the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization, Jena and Noor Chanaa. In writing about the inevitable controversy, The Washington Post led with the angle that faculty, staff, students, and advocacy groups are accusing the university police of acting improperly in banning the two women and also in searching their family’s home.

    Only by the fourth paragraph does the Post get around to noting that, oh, by the way, here’s what police found in the Chanaa home: four guns, 20 magazines with 30 bullets each, Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and arm patches in Arabic which, when translated, read “Kill them where they stand,” and patches that call for “death to Jews and America.”

    The discovery of an arms cache hasn’t stopped self-styled defenders of Muslim rights from bestowing victimhood upon the sisters — see this open letter — and it hasn’t stopped the WaPo from using their claims to distract from news of armed pro-Palestinian militants in Northern Virginia.

    “This case reeks of racial and religious profiling,” said Abdel-Rahman Hamed, the family’s attorney, in a statement. “The items found were part of a historical collection, not evidence of any threat. … This is yet another example of the police state targeting American Muslims without cause.”

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  • Combative CEO of Ballad Health Blames His Own Doctors for Hospital Quality Issues

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    sherlockj

    Image: Ballad’s Johnson City TN Medical Center

    by James C. Sherlock

    Carol Bova and I have written often in this space about the largest government-sponsored hospital monopoly in America, Ballad Health in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and Virginia. Ballad is made up of 20 hospitals that exclusively serve 1.1 million people.

    Ballad was established jointly in 2018 by a Tennessee Certificate of Public Advantage, or COPA, agreement and by a Virginia Cooperative Agreement. 

    It was done for three reasons stated by Tennessee:

    it is the policy of this State, in certain instances,

    • to displace competition among hospitals with regulation… and to actively supervise that regulation to the fullest extent required by law,
    • in order to promote cooperation and coordination among hospitals in the provision of health services; and 
    • to provide state action immunity from federal and state antitrust law to the fullest extent possible to those hospitals issued a certificate of public advantage

    Those charters effectively formed an interstate version of Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need (COPN) law that was created for the same reasons, but is not nearly as honest in declaring its intent.

    On December 6th, Brett Kelman of KFF Health News published an expose of Ballad in the Tennessee Lookout. The article challenges the notion in the COPA that quality of care in Ballad hospitals is actively supervised by the two states and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS).  

    Readers perhaps will find most interesting the combative interview with Ballad CEO Alan Levine.

    In it Levine disclaims Ballad’s responsibility for quality of care in its hospitals.

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  • Data Centers: Will Virginia Bend the Knee to the Green Lobby?

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: ChatGPT

    by James A. Bacon

    Electricity demand from data centers in Virginia potentially could double over the next 10 years if unconstrained by infrastructure limitations, according to an independent forecast produced for the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). Billions of dollars of new solar farms, wind farms, gas-fired generators, battery storage facilities, and electric transmission lines would have to be built to meet the demand. Meeting even half the demand, says the JLARC report, would be “difficult to achieve.”

    “The biggest challenge would be building new natural gas plants. New gas would need to be added at the rate of about one large, 1,500 MW plant every two years for 15 consecutive years,” the report concludes.

    Building out the infrastructure would be expensive, and electricity rates would rise. A typical residential customer of Dominion Energy could see inflation-adjusted costs rise by $14 to $37 monthly, the report says.

    The study, “Data Centers in Virginia,” lays out the trade-offs facing Virginia, which has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives demand for energy-intensive processing power to heights unimagined only a few years ago. Chasing the economic opportunity would dash green dreams of a carbon-free electric grid.

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  • Time Is Running Out for Change at UVA

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Time is running short for Governor Glenn Youngkin to make his mark on the University of Virginia. His appointees to the Board of Visitors now comprise a 13-to-4 majority, yet after almost a half year, they have failed to make a visible dent in the priorities set by President Jim Ryan. Youngkin has little more than a year left in office. If the likely Democratic candidate for governor, Abigail Spanberger, succeeds him, she could easily reverse the little progress he’s made.

    The sand is fast draining from the hourglass. The painfully slow pace of change came into focus during the Board of Visitors’ quarterly meeting last week. Youngkin appointees signaled that they intended to take a closer look at UVA finances. Mind you, they didn’t contest a single administrative proposal. Three building projects totaling more than a half a billion dollars in cost are still moving through the bureaucratic pipeline. Rather, Youngkin board members flexed their majority muscles by expressing their intent to take a closer look in the future.

    As for doing something tangible such as cutting spending and tuition, reining in the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, halting the double standards applied to different student groups, or bringing about intellectual diversity at an institution overwhelmingly dominated by left-of-center faculty and administrators, those conversations haven’t even begun.

    When board member Bert Ellis declared that he would vote “no” on any proposed new spending increase until the administration presented a budget with significant spending and tuition cuts, not a single board member spoke in agreement. The few docile challenges that have taken place amount to tinkering on the margins.

    Why is this so?

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  • Racking Up the Fees

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    James A. Bacon

    Matan Goldstein, the Jewish student who was subjected to repeated antisemitic treatment at the University of Virginia, has settled his lawsuit against the University. Terms of the settlement were not revealed.

    While the public cannot know how much UVA paid, if anything, to make the problem go away, we can get a sense of how much it spent on legal fees.

    According to billing documents obtained by my Jefferson Council colleague Walter Smith, Richmond law firm McGuire Woods billed $521,000 dollars in July, August, and September, charging as much as $1,054 per hour for partner Jonathan T. Blank’s time.

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  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • Virginia Education Press Needs Intensive Support

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    by Todd Truitt

    If you were expecting any humility after the Virginia education press ran with the false claim for months that 70%+ of Virginia schools would be in the bottom two of four summative categories (Off Track, Needs Intensive Support) of the new accountability system–-when it was actually in the 30s—think again. The Washington Post is on the case this week with a 1,600+ word article, devoting substantial column space to instead implying that a government conspiracy occurred.

    The Post also, astonishingly, spends most of the other column space implying that the fact that the new system brings much greater transparency to Virginia’s educational inequality is a negative. However, that transparency is a feature of accountability systems, not a bug. With the new transparent accountability system, we’re going to stop talking about educational inequality in quiet rooms and start talking about it publicly so we can better devote resources to the schools that need assistance.

    Washington Post Sees Government Conspiracy in Press Mistake

    As I detailed five weeks ago now, the Virginia education press ran with a made-up 70% metric that was first speculated at an August Virginia Board of Education (VBOE) meeting in an off-the-cuff estimate from a slide that clearly stated it was based on “partially modeled data.” State Superintendent Coons even warned at the meeting that the 70% metric was fabricated, “I think we’re making assumptions before we have data, so I caution us to make assumptions without that information.”

    But the Virginia education press publicized it broadly anyway, particularly Anna Bryson of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Once the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) received almost all outstanding information seven weeks later, the VDOE provided an FAQ, which showed that, in fact, 37% of Virginia schools were in the bottom two tiers.

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  • Bacon Meme of the Week

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    James A. Bacon

  • Day of Infamy

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

  • Mandatory Vehicle Inspections Expensive, Burdensome, Unproven

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    By Joshua Devamithran

    Virginia’s mandatory vehicle safety inspection program is less than a decade away from its centennial anniversary. Established in 1932, Virginia’s inspection program is the oldest continuous program in the country. In 1975, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia had mandatory safety inspection programs. Today, Virginia is one of just fifteen states that have retained such a mandatory inspection program.

    The stated purpose of Virginia’s mandatory vehicle safety inspection program is to promote highway safety. Inspection programs seek to accomplish this goal by reducing the number of vehicles with existing or potential conditions that may contribute to vehicle crashes and fatalities. The logic concludes that mandatory inspection programs are necessary to achieve this goal.

    However, to date, studies have not shown a statistically significant relationship between mandatory inspection programs and an increase in motor safety. In 2015, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyzed studies published between 1992 and 2013 that were relevant for determining the safety benefits and costs of state vehicle inspection programs across the nation. Their survey of these studies examined the effect of inspection programs on crash rates related to vehicle component failure and found no clear influence. In some places like Nebraska, after the mandatory inspection program was eliminated in 1982, the number of crashes caused by vehicle component defects actually declined.

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  • UVA Board Asserts Oversight of Strategic Investment Fund

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The Youngkin-appointed majority in the University of Virginia Board of Visitors flexed its muscles for the first time Friday, asserting its authority to oversee the Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) accounting for 2% to 3% of the UVA academic division’s total spending.

    Board members also signaled that they wanted advance notice of the administration’s proposed 2025-26 academic-year budget rather than being presented with a fait accompli in the June meeting.

    Board deliberations were civil and non-confrontational. Indeed, the board approved a 5.5% increase in student housing and meal plans next year as well as tuition increases up to 4%, depending upon the program, for graduate and professional students.

    Board member Doug Wetmore, who introduced the motion authorizing the board to assume more oversight of the SIF, stressed that the overwhelming majority of the administration’s proposals probably would meet board approval. “It’s been a very successful program,” he said.

    However, he described it as “essential” for the board to review the proposals, which have added up to a half billion dollars since its creation in 2016. “A core responsibility of the board is to review spending of this magnitude,” he said.

    A majority of board members agreed.

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  • RGGI Carbon Tax Decreases in Latest Regional Auction

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    Steve Haner

    The final 2024 auction for Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative carbon allowances, held December 4, broke the recent pattern and produced a noticeably lower clearing price. The price of $20.05 per ton of emitted carbon dioxide is still higher than was ever charged to Virginia electricity producers during Virginia’s three years in the program.

    The December 2024 auction price was 38% above the amount generators had to pay a year ago but is down from the 2024 peak of $25.75 per ton in September. A Floyd County Circuit Court judge has ruled that the Youngkin Administration erred in removing Virginia from the RGGI regime a year ago, and only an Act of the Assembly could accomplish that, but an appeal is likely. Virginia may or may not be back in the auction business for 2025, but if it is, expect revenue to the state of at least $400 million per annum. 

    The money paid out by the energy generators ends up being charged to energy customers, one way or another. The largest buyer of RGGI carbon allowances in Virginia has been Dominion Energy Virginia, which simply passed the cost along dollar for dollar to customers. RGGI is simply a carbon tax. Just like the carbon tax in Europe, but there the tax hits all forms of hydrocarbon energy, not just electricity. The European Union carbon tax is also three times as high as the RGGI tax, after converting euros to dollars. If Democrats have their way, Virginia will catch up. 

    The background information on Wednesday’s RGGI auction does not list Dominion or Appalachian Power Company among the bidders for new allowances. Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, part owner of a major coal plant in southern Virginia, was listed as a registered bidder but what it may have bought is not reported.  

    December was also supposed to see the next capacity auction for the load serving utilities in the PJM Interconnection Region, which has some (but only some) overlap with the RGGI states. That auction has been postponed to next summer. The last PJM auction, like the immediate previous RGGI auction, produced record prices for reliable hydrocarbon-based generation, prompting Dominion to seek a method of charging customers more for that, too. 

    — SDH

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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