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Bacon Meme of the Week
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State Revenue Up a Full Third in Northam Years
Departing Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne by Steve Haner
With one month to go in its fiscal year, Virginia has almost met its General Fund revenue target in the first eleven months, as the revenue bonanza described here before continues. Partly it is due to the strong economic recovery post-COVID, but it is also due to numerous increased tax rates or policy changes under Governor Ralph Northam.
With 11 months of the basic taxes now accounted for, the state has collected just a hair under $22 billion towards the $22.3 billion it estimated in the budget adopted last year and amended this winter. Compared to the same point four years ago, total GF revenue has grown a full one-third. With the deepest recession of the past century in between the comparison points. (more…)
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To the Left of Karl Marx
An article in the today’s Wall Street Journal, “Innovationville, USA,” writes approvingly of universal incomes, citing no-strings-attached pilot programs in Stockton, Calif., Peterson, N.J., and… (drum roll)… Richmond, Va. The Richmond Resilience Initiative provides $500 per month to 18 working families who don’t qualify for other aid but who, in Mayor Levar Stoney’s estimation, don’t make a living wage.I’ll concede that $500 a month isn’t a lot of money. And I’ll credit backers of the Richmond program for acknowledging that handing out too much moolah would dampen the incentive to work. However, many people back a more expansive program. For instance, Andrew Yang, an unsuccessful candidate for president and now a contender for mayor of New York, proposed a “freedom dividend” consisting of $1,000 monthly for each American adult.
I suppose it’s OK to conduct social experiments to see what families do with the extra money. We might learn something useful. But the famous admonition of Karl Marx comes to mind: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” (more…)
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A Volatile Mix: Sex, Obsession, Microaggressions and Mental Health at UVa
by James A. BaconKieran Bhattacharya, a University of Virginia School of Medicine student who claims he was expelled for challenging left-wing political orthodoxy at the school, has filed new papers expanding upon his allegations. Among the more explosive charges, he asserts that he was twice committed against his will to psychiatric facilities, given antipsychotic medication, and once woke up from his tranquilized state to find himself in a car bound for a private psychiatric hospital in Petersburg.
UVa’s response to Bhattacharya’s “dissident speech” is “reminiscent of the infamous ‘treatment’ of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals in the former Soviet Union,” says the pleading, which was filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court in Charlottesville in support of a request for a jury trial.
Adding another new dimension to the lawsuit, Bhattacharya contended that his ex-girlfriend collaborated with med school officials to drum him out of school after he had broken up with her. He describes her as a controlling, manipulative and vindictive woman who boasted how she had gained revenge against two former boyfriends at Emory University by charging them with rape.
After reading the filing, one is inclined to believe that one of two things must be true. Either the UVa med school is sitting on the biggest scandal in its history or Kieran Bhattacharya is a young man in serious need of help. (more…)
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Trees and the Chesapeake Bay
by Dick Hall-SizemoreThere was a scuffle on this blog a few days ago over the production of more hardwood seedlings by the Department of Forestry. There were some who questioned the efficacy of planting more trees in the attempt to mitigate climate change. Others questioned why the state should be subsidizing the production of seedlings in the first place.
Being an ardent fan of trees, I was intrigued, and I contacted the Department of Forestry to get some more background on the program. After getting the agency’s answers to my questions, I realized there is a bigger issue at play.
The bigger issue is the protection and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. The health of the Bay is affected by point source pollution and nonpoint source pollution. We have been able to deal fairly effectively with point source pollution, such as the discharges from wastewater treatment plants. Nonpoint source pollution is much trickier. Agricultural runoff and erosion constitute a large portion of the nonpoint source pollution affecting the Bay. (more…)
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Do Fatal Police Shootings Indicate Racism?
Sources: “Crime in Virginia 2020” and The Washington Post. by James A. Bacon
As protesters marched in many Virginia cities last year in protest of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., many Virginia politicians suggested that the kind of police abuses occurring in other states were endemic here in Virginia. The General Assembly enacted numerous laws to reduce mass incarceration and curtail perceived police abuses. All the protests and lawmaking occurred in a factual vacuum, however. Was there any truth to the proposition that Blacks were more likely than Whites to be killed by police here in Virginia? Is law enforcement in Virginia “systemically racist”? No one provided any data to confirm or falsify the proposition.
Data does exist. The Virginia State Police published Monday its “Crime in Virginia 2020” report. The report devotes a section to officer-involved shootings, of which there were 13 resulting in fatalities and 19 in injuries. The report does not identify the race of the police shooting victims, but by cross-referencing the published information with the Washington Post police shootings database, I was able to identify the race/ethnicity of 12 of the 13 men (they were all men) killed by police. Six were White, four Black, one Hispanic, and one Asian.
Do those numbers support the conclusion that police are more likely to resort to deadly violence against Blacks than Whites? It depends on what you use as your yardstick for comparison. (more…)
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The Primary Results — Explaining the Obvious
Tuesday’s big winner: Terry McAuliffe. Photo credit: The Washington Post by Chris Saxman
There is no sense doing a deep dive on Tuesday’s elections results because there is not a lot of depth to explore.
Somethings are just obvious.
In the end:
- Money talks and bullshit walks.
- Challengers don’t win – incumbents lose.
- The leadership of the Democratic Party of Virginia is firmly in control.
- There was ZERO ideological shift in either party.
- Base voters want fighters who can win. They are angry and want that anger represented. (Reminder – anger is fear based) Many vote Against rather than For.
- Legacy media continues to lose influence on voter behavior as they become more partisan.
- #1 data point from Tuesday? The similarity in Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe primary vote totals. 2017: Northam 303,531. 2021: McAuliffe 303,410. That’s the base of the Democratic Party of Virginia.
- Destiny might be more geography than demography.
And here we go… (more…)
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Debunking the Big Lie in Education Funding
Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay by DJ Rippert
The big lie. Various intellectuals, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, have repeatedly put forth the falsehood that funding for public K-12 education in America has been decreasing. In fact, the opposite is true. However, the number of times that false claims about defunding public education have been made, published and (eventually) retracted / corrected leaves one wondering whether these are uninformed errors or an effort to repeat a “big lie” in the hope that Americans will come to accept the lie.
Falsehood. Publication. Eventual correction. Repeat. An Op-Ed piece in the Washington Examiner penned by Corey DeAngelis documents disturbing cases of factual errors about education funding made by so-called experts and published by so-called professional news outlets. In each case, the error was eventually corrected. However, those corrections were made days after the original false statement. (more…)
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Businesses Taxed For Somebody Else’s Layoffs?
Labor Force Participation Rates, March 2021. Source: VEC Click for larger view. It represents the percentage of population of working age employed or seeking a job. by Steve Haner
So many Virginia employers faltered or failed during 2020, the remaining companies may be charged a special tax of $95 on each of their own employees in 2022. It will cover the unemployment benefits paid to workers somebody else laid off, the highest so called “pool tax” ever imposed, more than double the amount collected following the previous recession in 2012.
The total unemployment insurance tax (average) may reach $360 per employee in 2022: A base tax of $249, the pool tax of $95 and a special “fund builder” tax of $16. That is more than 50% higher than the previous peak tax in 2012.
The figures emerged this morning as the Virginia Unemployment Commission staff briefed a legislative oversight panel on the financial health of the state’s beleaguered Unemployment Insurance program, swamped by a record number of claims in the COVID-19 recession and hampered by administrative failures in dealing with claims that needed extra attention.
For details, here is the UI Status Report presented today, following the usual format. VEC also provided more information on Virginia’s employment history over time, by region, industry, and locality. (more…)
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Pharrell Offers Low-Income Families School Choice
Pharrell Williams by Kerry Dougherty
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say Pharrell Williams is much more than a hugely successful rapper, musician and songwriter.
He’s something of a visionary.
Where others see insurmountable problems, Pharrell finds opportunity.
For instance, Virginia Beach struggled for years with the annual College Beach Weekend in April when tens of thousands of mostly African American students would flock to the beach for a three-day party.
Too many young people, too little to do plus an influx of troublemakers meant the celebration often turned violent. After years of problems, tensions between the city and the revelers were raw.
Enter Pharrell. (more…)
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A Spirited Defense of George Rogers Clark
George Rogers Clark I reproduce here a letter from state Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, who attended the University of Virginia and lived across West Main Street from the statue of George Rogers Clark. He addressed the letter to UVa President Jim Ryan and the Board of Visitors. — JAB
I want to write, firstly, to acknowledge and express my appreciation at the University’s decision to conduct its Commencement activities in-person and without any undue restrictions. As a parent of a graduating student, it made a difference.
Secondly, I want to register my disappointment at the decision to remove the George Rogers Clark statue from its traditional location on West Main Street and presumably place it somewhere so it will never be seen again. What a mistake.
Although little known today, George Rogers Clark was an enormous figure in the early history of the United States. During the Revolutionary War, the British crown controlled the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains and waged war against their former colonists through the services of local tribes, primarily Shawnee. During that time, the British General Henry Hamilton (a.k.a. “the Hair Buyer”) paid a bounty for the scalps of American settlers, including women and children, who lived alone on the frontier and were largely defenseless. (more…)
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Can Free Speech Thrive in an Intellectual Monoculture?
Jim Ryan by James A. Bacon
My fellow members of The Jefferson Council and I are united in our determination to protect the Jeffersonian legacy at the University of Virginia, in particular to champion free speech and expression on the grounds. An internal debate we have is whether we should work with President James Ryan in advancing this goal or rather, seeing him as part of the problem, work to remove him. We have reached no formal conclusion.
Ryan has not been entirely unresponsive to our concerns. Most notably, he appointed a committee to draft a statement on free speech and expression, which it did and which the Board of Visitors formally adopted. But, as Ryan himself conceded, the challenge now is to actually apply those abstract principles to real world circumstances.
I have argued that it is meaningless to champion free speech if all UVa administrators and faculty members hew to the same narrow range of moderate-left-to-far-left worldviews and other voices are systematically weeded out through the hiring and firing process. Creating an institution where a “marketplace of ideas” leads to a vibrant exchange of views presupposes that participants actually have… different ideas. (more…)
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Gender and Race Quotas for School Discipline?
by Hans BaderDoes anyone seriously doubt that boys misbehave more than girls in school? Until recently, no one would have disputed that, as surveys of students show that boys get into fights at twice the rate girls do. In those same surveys, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, Blacks say they get into fights at more than twice the rate Whites do on school grounds.
But the nation’s Democratic attorney generals either don’t know about, or don’t believe, these surveys. Instead, they seem to believe that every racial or sexual group misbehaves at exactly the same rate. Every single Democratic state attorney general in America — all 24 of them, including Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring — recently cited the higher discipline rates of Blacks and boys, as causes for alarm, in a May 24 letter to the Education Secretary and U.S. Attorney General.
The letter urged the Biden administration to reinstate and expand the Obama administration’s school-discipline guidance, which encouraged schools to suspend Blacks and Whites at the same rate, to target not just statistical disparities based on race, but also disparities based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. (more…)
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Wait, What? Virginia Law Enforcement Employment Increased 13% in 2020?
Full-Time Law Enforcement Employees, Virginia, Oct. 31, 2020. Source: Crime in Virginia 2020 In conservative media, we often hear how law-enforcement morale plummeted last year in the face of withering criticism from politicians, media and even the public. We read of rising retirements and resignations and of shrinking recruitment, especially in big cities where anti-police rhetoric is strongest. So, what’s the story in Virginia?
If the data from the Crime in Virginia 2020 report is to be believed, local governments in the Old Dominion dramatically boosted the number of law enforcement personnel last year. Full-time law-enforcement employment as of Oct. 31 rose to more than 27,400 — up from 24,400 the previous year.
Employment by the Virginia State Police and college police forces was fairly stable, but the number of county law enforcement officers surged 24%, city officers by 26%, and “other agency” officers by 40%. (more…)
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Assaults on Police Up Slightly in 2020
by James A. BaconLast year was unprecedented for the number of street protests and anti-police rhetoric in Virginia. Police morale plummeted in the face of public hostility. How did the wave of unrest translate into physical danger for police?
According to the Crime in Virginia 2020 report, which tracks the number of Virginia police officers killed and assaulted, there was an uptick in anti-police violence — to 1,973 assaults on officers in 2020 from 1,939 the previous year, an increase of 1.7%.
But the data does shows changes in circumstances. Although the number of officers injured in “civil disorders” was relatively trivial compared to all sources of assaults, it did triple year-over-year to 33. Protests have simmered down this year, so that number is likely to subside. Alarmingly, however, the number of law enforcement officers killed in “ambush” attacks doubled from seven to 15. (more…)
