Bacon's Rebellion

Gov. Mark Warner was interviewed this morning on NPR about Medicaid. As Chairman of the National Governors Association, he is the leading spokesperson for the states on this troubling issue.

Virginia has seen Medicaid spending go from $1 billion to $5 billion over the last 15 years. Warner identified three factors contributing to the rise: the Federal government push costs to the states, fewer employers offering insurance (in effect urging employees to go on Medicaid), and the “disinvestment” of senior citizen assets, making them eligible for Medicare funded long-term care because they are suddenly “poor.” As Medicaid spending surpasses education spending in states, Warner says a “grandma vs. grandkids” confrontation is being created.

The Governor sounded confident and in command of the issue. He deftly sidestepped a late question asking if the Medicare issue might make someone want to be president.

I’m not the only one to be fixated on the ever-growing state surplus, which the Associated Press now pegs at $1 billion this year. (I presume that’s over and above the surplus talked about in January, which the General Assembly largely funneled into road projects, though I’m not sure.) Arlingtonian Tim Wise over at the Growls blog quotes The Washington Post and Richmond Times-Dispatch:

According to the Post, the Secretary of Finance “told the Senate Finance Committee that tax collections have increased by 15.2% over the first 11 months of the last fiscal year . . . well ahead of the official forecast of 10.3% growth for fiscal 2005, which ends in two weeks. Revenue grew at an even higher rate in May, increasing by 23% over last year.” The AP story in today’s Newport News Daily Press points out, “Even without last year’s $1.4 billion tax increase, revenue would have been up 19.2% last month.” The bottom line, as usual, seems to be provided in a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial: either Governor Warner’s fiscal analysts “are woefully off base in their revenue projections . . . or Warner and his staff continue lowballing estimates in order to increase support for the Governor’s political agenda.”

Everyone has their own idea of what to do with that money. My personal favorite is to give it back to the taxpayers. One place to start looking for ideas might be the Freedom & Prosperity Agenda unveiled by a coalition of Virginia conservaties in April. Just to get the conversation started, here are some of that group’s ideas:

• Eliminate the War of 1812 tax (BPOL)
• Pass a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR)
• Eliminate the Death tax
• Eliminate the prepayment of the Sales and Use tax
• Constitutional Amendment to base real estate taxes on the acquisition value of the property
• Proposals for new taxes must contain sunset provisions
• Eliminate the car tax

For details on the Freedom & Prosperity Agenda, click here.

Not Larry Sabato runs the Virginia House of Delegates 2005 Elections blog and he is the toast of the Commonwealth after a perfect record of predicting Tuesday’s elections (although Not Mark Rozell begs to differ).

Not content to rest on his laurels, Not Larry has announced a Friday “Celebrity Blogging” feature that debuts June 23d. Sen. Ken Cuccinelli, R-Fairfax, and David Englin, Democratic Delegate-elect from Arlington, will each discuss one candidate or issue each week.

Virginia Pundit Watch will be watching!

Virginia Tech is sponsoring an early childhood conference in Charlottesville with a focus on “development through inclusion – regardless of physical or mental ability.”

Workshops will examine “cultural differences and disabilities in children in order to provide collaborative, instructional strategies and curriculums designed to meet the needs of all children.” Speaker Mara Shapon-Shevin will expound upon the idea of applying “the practice of inclusion” to all classrooms “in order to eradicate inclusion’s general association with special needs children.” Blah, blah, woof, woof, eyes glaze over.

Is it just me, or does this sound like a touchie-feelie fest? Does anyone really think that more “inclusion” will help special needs students? Am I overlooking something when I observe that “special needs” students have special needs — that they need specialized exercises and programs tailored to their level of cognitive development? In some instances, I would guess, children could be mainstreamed with their peers and given special instruction for an hour or two per day. But certainly not all. Am I sounding cold and callous by suggesting that “inclusion” of inappropriate children in mainstream classes will result in the dumbing down of the curriculum for students who are not disabled?

Disabled children certainly deserve our compassion, but is “inclusion” truly the best way to help them? I don’t know the answers. I’m just asking questions.

The editorial board of the Washington Post has responded to Tuesday’s Virginia primary:

The results set the stage for what should be a sharp debate over the critical questions facing the state: first and foremost, fiscal policy and how to improve Virginia’s badly inadequate transportation system.

Both major party tickets fall short on answering these “critical questions,” according to the editorial, but amazingly the Post doesn’t see what several Virginia papers have seen–the Russ Potts solution.

With that easy answer not on the table, the Post offers this prescription:

Virginia needs a serious dialogue about how to raise the tens of billions of dollars needed for transportation over the next decade or two.

That’s the ticket–serious dialogue, not the whimsical dialogues we’ve been having all these years. This transportation problem is only now getting bad!

I’m starting to believe that it’s the editorial boards, not the candidates, who are avoiding the serious dialogue and tough choices. It’s easy for an editor in an air conditioned office to proclaim that transportation needs tens of billions more dollars. It’s a lot tougher for a candidate to choose Coalfields Expressway over Route 29 bypass, or rail to Dulles over widening Rt. 66 in Arlington, or the hundred other choices presented as they campaign across the state. It’s easy to call for spending money to repair bridges deemed inadequate by a national study; it’s harder to face voters stuck in traffic jams for months while the work is performed, and then longer when inevitably the project goes over budget or additional problems are discovered.

Never let it be said that I am hostile to the Virginia Information Technologies Agency because former Secretary of Technology George Newstrom swore that it would generate $100 million a year in savings and we haven’t come close to achieving that goal — a goal that everyone is doing the best they can to shove down the memory hole.

VITA is doing some useful things. (Believe it or not, I’m not being facetious here). It is putting a lot of forms online, making government more accessible to the public. The latest two examples:

Department of Charitable Gaming launches online bingo registration service. Find out more.

Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services launches new online animal record reporting system. Find out more.

Never let it be said that I’m unwilling to ignore evidence that contradicts my pet theories, in this case my argument that speculation is driving much of the increase in Northern Virginia property values. Today’s Clarke Times-Courier quotes George Mason University regional economist Stephen Fuller to the effect that super-heated job creation in Northern Virginia accounts for the spectacular rise in real estate prices. Sayeth the Times-Courier:

Job growth is running so much stronger than last year,” Fuller said. “We are so strong it’s almost embarrassing.” The [Washington] region added a whopping 287,000 new jobs between 1999 and 2004, according to the GMU Trends Report. And that trend is continuing. Between April 2004 and April 2005, an additional 84,400 jobs were created–53,900 of them in Northern Virginia.

“There were seven times as many new jobs created in Northern Virginia as suburban Maryland,” Fuller said. “We are fat,” he added. “We are better than any market in the United States. “In fact, the Northern Virginia economy has outperformed every other metropolitan region in the country over the past five to six years, the report says. And it seems it is just going to get better.”

Last year was the best since 2000,” Fuller said, “and this year is going to be better than last year.”

Yesterday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch published the seemingly alarming news (“Virginia is for Dumpers“) that shipments of trash from other states to Virginia increased 18 percent in 2004, reaching 7.8 million tons. That includes everything from household trash and construction debris to medical waste and treated human waste. Virginia now retains the dubious distinction of being the No. 2 trash importer, behind Pennsylvania, in the country.

I know this really upsets my friends in the environmental community, but I just don’t get it. Trash has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? What difference does it make if it winds up in a landfill in New York or Virginia? It’s not as if we Virginians have to smell the stuff. We wouldn’t even know it was there if the T-D didn’t tell us!

I have a laissez-faire attitude towards the shipping and disposal of trash as long as–and this is an important qualification–it’s dumped in properly regulated landfills that protect the groundwater from leachate and the neighbors from nasty odors. As best as I can tell, Virginia’s massive, industrial-sized landfills have done a great job. If they didn’t, we would have heard about it.

Actually, I regard the trash disposal business as a good thing. I marvel that New Yorkers and other out-of-staters are actually paying us cash money to take their garbage. The big landfills are located in poor, out-of-the-way jurisdictions like Charles City and Amelia, and pay the localities handsomely for the privilege. The greater the volume of trash, the higher the payments to these localities, allowing them to support higher levels of services–especially funding for schools–than they otherwise could afford. If New Yorkers want to subsidize the education of Virginia children because no one wants landfills in the Empire State, that’s fine with me.

If first you don’t succeed…

Well, I’m going to try to stir the pot for a second time.

The Washington Post reported, Bill Bolling said, “I look forward to competing against my opponent, Ms. Byrne,’ Bolling said in his usual conversational style. ‘And I want to encourage her to invite the candidate for president that she championed in 2004, Howard Dean, to Virginia, to campaign by her side. We hope she does that.”

When Leslie Byrne co-chair the 2004 Howard Dean for President campaign in Virginia, she wrote a Washington Post letter-to-the-editor stating her objections to the war in Iraq:

http://fordean.org/aa/issues/press_view.asp?ID=2334

Is Leslie Byrne an asset, or a liability for Gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine and Attorney General candidate Creigh Deeds?

~the blue dog

Yo! Phil! You got to surface sooner or later. Come out! Come out! Give us the spin! Shall we set loose the nosy hounds?

Oh double democratic hockey sticks! Former DPVA chair Paul Goldman dissed Byrne back in 2002. Holy cow! Has the Democratic LG seat been sold down the James River!
………………..
https://www.baconsrebellion.com/Issues/11-11-02/Gilmore

Goldman wrote:
“They call me Governor Gridlock! Who gave me that name, that guy Goldman with the big mouth? He put the “Tax Governor” tag on Baliles, desperate to save Wilder’s bacon. He was right: it was otherwise sure defeat for Wilder, just like it was for Beyer when he waffled on taxes against me.
No, it wasn’t Goldman, he ain’t smart enough to think of the Gridlock thing. He got lucky with Wilder. No, it was Leslie Byrne, the senator from Fairfax.
She is worse than Panny Rhodes, the former delegate from Richmond I helped redistrict out of her General Assembly seat as punishment for opposing me. Come to think, I did the same thing to Leslie Byrne, too! We redistricted her out of her Senate seat for the 2003 election.
That will teach her to call me Governor Gridlock. Leslie, baby, think of that while being stuck in traffic up here! You will have plenty of extra time!”

Since Tuesday, Kilgore is having the darnedest time figuring out where he wants to be in the political spectrum. He can’t run on the Right after the shellacking laid on Grover Norquist’s candidates. He can’t run as a centrist, because that aligns him with Mark Warner. And the ‘liberal’ slots are already taken. And now this–get him off script for two seconds and he makes the biggest blunder of his campaign–he ducks and runs on Russ Potts–and the second biggest–he says on the record, in public, that Potts can’t win. If I were Potts, I’d be on the first plane to Vegas. Surely a fortune awaits anyone with that kind of luck.

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher apparently was deluged with anti-Russ Potts comments prior to his online chat today. Fisher had written a piece on Tuesday that crossed the line from opinion journalism to hagiography.

This question and response went to the heart of media’s role:

Saltville, Va.: Why don’t you just admit upfront that Russ Potts makes good copy and that you aren’t going to disturb this endless trove of sound bytes by looking too closely at the man’s flip-flops, his motivation, or the depth of his positions?

Marc Fisher: Potts certainly wins something of a bye because he is crusty, outspoken, fun and has little chance of winning. So if his function is to keep the other candidates’ feet to the fire on issues they’d rather not address, then, yes, he is likely to win less scrutiny than Kilgore and Kaine will get. But if he starts showing himself to be a real contender, then he’d get the same sort of close and vigorous coverage that the Dem and the Repo will get.

Now we know–unless you might win, you get a pass if you’re a “media darling.”

In an editorial today, The Wall Street Journal has come up with a more optimistic interpretation of Tuesday’s primary election results than I did. American elections are so rigged in favor of the incumbent, the WSJ notes, that any ejection of entrenched office holders is significant. In that light, the low-tax movement made significant progress:

The most vocal of those pro-tax incumbents was so embattled that he withdrew from the race. Another was trounced, two-to-one, by a twentysomething political neophyte. Two others barely won, and in the statewide contest to select the GOP’s Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General nominees, the tax hike defenders were upset up anti-tax challengers. Several other tax-raising Republicans beat back challenges more comfortably, but we suspect that they also got the voter message.

The WSJ also raised the issue, little remarked upon by Virginia’s own commentariat, of Virginia’s massive surplus:

GOP taxpayers had reason to be upset because they now know the $1.4 billion tax increase was sold under false pretenses. Democratic Governor Mark Warner–who had won in 2001 on a no-new-taxes-pledge–argued that it was necessary to balance the state budget even as the reviving economy was creating a new revenue surge. This year Virginia is sitting on a $1.5 billion surplus thanks to a 14% rise in tax revenues.

I don’t sense that the mounting surplus played much of a factor in the primary races. I rarely heard it mentioned. But that doesn’t change the fact that Virginia voters ought to be furious at those who raised taxes unnecessarily.

I am totally dumbfounded by today’s Tyler Whitley story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Kilgore refuses to debate Potts.” I guess the Kilgore campaign knows what it is doing, but it’s hard for me to understand why they were willing to revive the debate ducking charge, the performance anxiety issue, and give more free publicity to Russ Potts.

As Barnie Day has pointed out, this is a three way race now. It only takes 34% to win. Why Kilgore won’t honor the widely accepted 15% threshold for third party participation in debates is beyond me. Potts isn’t near that number now, but the Kilgore position, plus all the recent fawning press Potts has received, might get him there … and beyond.

The first step out of the gate after the primary does not appear to be a sure-footed one.