This is a Virginia public policy blog. Someone please stop me before I publish more AI-generated cat videos!
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I Can’t Help Myself!
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A State Income Tax Rate to 10% for $1 Million-per-Year Households?
Image credit: Grok by Hans Bader
Delegate Kelly Convirs-Fowler, D-Virginia Beach, has introduced a bill (HB 188) to increase state income taxes in Virginia, raising the marginal tax rate from 5.75% to 10% on people making over $1 million.
Virginia already has higher state income taxes than most of its neighbors. Kentucky has a maximum tax rate of 3.5%, North Carolina has a maximum tax rate of 3.99%, West Virginia has a maximum tax rate of 4.82%, while Virginia has a maximum tax rate of 5.75%. Tennessee has no state income tax. As a result, Virginia is now one of the higher-tax states both in terms of dollars paid, and tax burdens compared to other states.
That’s a big change from the recent past. In 2015, Virginia had lower state income tax rates than West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Back then, the top marginal tax rate was 6.5% in West Virginia, 6% in Kentucky, and 5.8% in North Carolina, compared to 5.75% in Virginia. And the lowest tax rate (for low-income households) was 5.8% in North Carolina, 3% in West Virginia, and 2% in Kentucky, compared to 2% in Virginia (most taxpayers pay the top marginal tax rate in each state). But since then, Virginia’s neighbors have cut tax rates a lot, unlike Virginia.
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A Golden Parachute for Some
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
So far, Gov.-elect Spanberger has designated four members of the General Assembly for her Cabinet or high level administrative position:
Del. Mark Sickles (D-Fairfax)—Secretary of Finance
Del. David Bulova (D-Fairfax)—Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources
Del. Candi Mundon King (D-Prince William)—Secretary of the Commonwealth
Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Arlington)—Senior Adviser to the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority
For each legislator, particularly Sickles, Bulova, and Ebbin, the appointments will result in a financial windfall for each of them in the future. That is because members of the General Assembly are members of the Virginia Retirement System.
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The Abigail Era Begins
by Gordon C. Morse
Next week, Virginia will open the 2026 regular session of the Virginia General Assembly, with the Democratic Party ruling both House and Senate, then proceed to inaugurate a new governor, Abigail Spanberger.
How will it go?
Ah, yes, there’s the question. You can guess, but you don’t really know and that will make the weeks and months ahead “instructive.”
Virginia’s cultural unity, the sureness and confidence of its political institutions, got clattered and banged in the first quarter of the 21st century. Virginia has never been more pluralistic, never more given to negotiation. We ignore the cleavages, grasp for rhetorical reassurances and, with reason, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce prefers it that way.
But, c’mon. We have a geographic, political arrangement called “Virginia” you can sketch on a map and that’s about it.
The fellow who employed me 40 years ago – Jerry Baliles – carried every Virginia congressional district in his successful 1985 bid for governor. Democratic lawmakers commanded the General Assembly then, too, but you’d find them dispersed about the entire state. Their political thinking favored disparity, as well.
Think Kipling. “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Democrats command the populous eastern half of Virginia and Republicans hold the west and trees don’t vote. Where does that leave us?
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A 10% Tax on Your Fantasy Football, Baseball?
by Steve Haner,
Forget raising the income or sales tax, it appears the 2026 Virginia General Assembly may try to balance the state budget by imposing a new 10% tax on all the sports fantasy game players in the Commonwealth.
Just when you think you know all the nooks and crannies of state government, another surprise appears. Who else knew that Virginia had required registration of sports fantasy game operators (those offering prize money) since 2016? But proposed legislation will take that all to a new level, changing simple registration into full-scale regulation and heavy taxation.
This is about Senate Bill 129, filed by (now departing, it seems) Senator Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria. Ebbin is leaving at some point in the session to take a full-time job from new Governor Abigail Spanberger, but somebody else will pick up this bill. There could be some serious revenue produced by a 10% tax on all the gross receipts of these games.
The bill also replaces a modest agency registration fee with a mandatory $50,000 license fee, something else the operators will find a way to pass onto their customer-players. This all seems aimed at the large marketplace for sports fantasy games, but the definition is broad enough that this could expand. Is anybody organizing Dungeons and Dragons tournaments for cash? Once dollars are on the table, the government gets very nosy and greedy.
This looks and smells like plenty of other laws and regulatory structures already on the books pushed by the dominant players in an industry to discourage potential competition. The list of firms already registered in Virginia is dominated by the big gaming firms also heavy into direct sports gambling, already regulated and taxed by the state. This passes and the cost of entry alone will protect their turf, but some ominous criminal sanctions for the unlicensed included in the bill will add to their comfort zone.
The people who care more about this than I do need to take up the battle. But step one is to warn them the bill is coming, and that is now done. Take it viral, readers. As the tribes gather down on Ninth Street for our annual festival of greed and government intrusion, this rule remains in force: No one’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
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The Deadly Consequences of Non-Compliant Nursing Home Reporting
by James C. Sherlock
Regulators and law enforcement agencies cannot oversee what they do not understand.
They do not understand nursing home management structures, and thus, business models of chains whose facilities, due to the core role of understaffing in those models, routinely abuse and cause the untimely deaths of residents.
Section 1124(c) of the Social Security Act is designed to provide enforcers with the data needed to understand nursing homes, their chains, and their complex relationships with other entities that provide goods and services. It instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to write rules to implement the law. He has done so.
On November 17, 2023, CMS published in the Federal Register a final rule title “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Disclosures of Ownership and Additional Disclosable Parties Information for Skilled Nursing Facilities and Nursing Facilities; Medicare Providers’ and Suppliers’ Disclosure of Private Equity Companies and Real Estate Investment Trusts” (88 FR 80141). This final rule implements parts of section 1124(c) of the Act, which requires SNFs to disclose detailed information about their ownership and management as well as additional data regarding:
(1) other parties with which the SNF is associated; and
(2) the ownership structures of these other parties.
Refer to Medicare Enrollment for Providers & Suppliers for more information on the SNF disclosure requirements.
Section 6101(b) of the Affordable Care Act states that no later than one year after final regulations promulgated under section 1124(c) of the Act are published in the Federal Register, the Secretary shall make the information reported available to the public. On November 21, 2024, CMS updated this dataset to include the reported information.
The Model to be Populated
Below is a notional model that the rule aims to populate. Not shown for space reasons but required for reporting are co-owned suppliers of goods and services, such as durable medical equipment for residents and non-emergency medical transportation, that are billed separately to Medicare and Medicaid.
Many have yet to fully comply with that rule and, by extension, the law. They have claimed variously:
- The instructions are unclear. (Not really.)
- Compliance is a lot of work. (They have a point.)
- Reporting would “take nurses from bedsides.” (Nonsense. All nursing homes have administrators. Chain staffs are full of them.)
An unspoken reason is that many are obsessed with secrecy. They not only do not wish to expose themselves to regulatory scrutiny and criminal investigations, but also fear that the information they are required to provide could expose them to tort claims beyond individual facilities.
CMS last month backed off for a second time on a requirement to report additional ownership information out of cycle, meaning under a deadline, rather than waiting for a change of ownership. An industry spokesperson told McKnight’s Long Term Care News that:
Providers remain committed to transparency around ownership and to adhering to reporting requirements.
Well. We’ll look.
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2026 Battery Bill is Still in Flux but Will Be Great!
by Steve Haner
Delegate Phil Henandez, D-Norfolk, Senator Lamont Bagby, D-Henrico and Delegate Richard Sullivan, D-Fairfax Advocates for adding massive amounts of battery storage to Virginia’s electric grid held a news conference Wednesday to claim again their upcoming bill will lower energy costs, not raise them, but added that the legislation they will push is still being drafted.
The 2026 General Assembly session starts in a week, and a version of the battery mandate bill was reviewed late last year by the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation (CEUR), but CEUR member Delegate Richard Sullivan, D-Arlington, said another version was coming. Whatever the changes, it is going to be great news for energy consumers, he and other legislators promised, flanked by people who are in the battery industry selling the hardware.
It was the bill version being discussed last month that sparked this report that the capital cost of all the new battery facilities could approach $54 billion, $62 billion if you included the battery mandates already listed in the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act. The basis for the estimate is the average cost of battery project applications now pending at the State Corporation Commission, about $675 million per gigawatt-hour.
The advocates spoke for close to a half hour without mentioning any cost figure. If they dispute the figure published on Bacon’s Rebellion, they didn’t say so. And none of the reporters at the event posed direct questions about the cost per megawatt or megawatt-hour that Virginia ratepayers will have to cover for Dominion Energy Virginia or Appalachian Power Company. Reporters did, and this was encouraging, understand the ratepayers will pay.
Some questions were about the cost versus benefit calculation behind the claims that adding batteries will make things cheaper. Sullivan’s best answer – correct – was that batteries would allow the utilities to purchase energy for storage when the production price is low, and then use it when the price peaks, preventing the need to buy off the grid at peak price. The opportunities for that kind of arbitrage are limited.
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New Details on the UVA Health System Scandal
by The Jefferson Council
The following document collection was obtained via a FOIA request concerning the UVA Health System scandal. During the formal internal investigation conducted last winter by Williams and Connelly, nearly three dozen doctors and one Board member of the UVA Physicians Group were interviewed by Jones Swanson and Huddell LLC, the attorneys for the concerned medical professionals. This collection contains their interviews and corresponding documents as well as an Executive Summary, all of which were presented to the Board of Visitors on February 25, 2025 in a special meeting called by then-Rector Robert Hardie. The full Williams and Connelly report on UVA Health has never been released to the public.
Absent that report, this collection provides critical insight into what was occurring within the UVA Health System. It contains extensive accounts and detailed reporting from medical professionals inside the system who raised serious concerns.When these issues were first brought forward in a letter of no confidence to University leadership on September 5, 2024, they were met not with transparency, but with resistance. In response, then-President Jim Ryan criticized and effectively demonized the doctors who spoke up, only to finally walk back his “disrespectful” statement seven months later in April 2025. By then, several members of UVA Health had resigned — with UVA providing virtually no explanations over the departures of CEO Craig Kent, Dean Melina Kibbe, or Dr. Ourania Preventza.
This sequence of events and the absence of clear public accountability make the contents of this document collection especially significant.
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What “Democracy” Looks Like to Louise Lucas
The “10-1” on Lucas’ armored fist in this X tweet stands for the goal of redrawing Virginia’s congressional districts to elect 10 Democrats and one Republican to Congress.
Reminder: In the 2024 House of Representatives elections in Virginia, 51.4% of the popular vote went to Democratic candidates, 47.6% to Republicans, and the rest to independents and write-ins.
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Extremists Doxxing TPUSA High School Club and Teacher Sponsor
by Victoria Manning
First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach is the latest battleground for extremists targeting Turning Point USA clubs. A public records request reveals activists attempting to silence students whose views they oppose. Even the TPUSA teacher sponsor is getting doxxed on social media for being a Christian.
Activist Danna Cullen runs a large social media page in Virginia Beach. She used her platform to unleash an incoherent tirade against the teacher sponsor of the club. Cullen encouraged students opposing the TPUSA club to act as undercover investigators to find what she called “toxic Christian Nationalist goods” they could report to the media. She also called the teacher sponsor a “kook” for wearing a cross.
In response, freelance journalist Rebekah Sanderlin, who writes for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, offered to aid any student willing to infiltrate the TPUSA club as a mole. On Dec. 16, a few days after the club met, Sanderlin told Cullen: “My kid at FC [First Colonial] told me she saw a bunch of kids joining the club who definitely were not the type to join it sincerely.”
Cullen continued attacking TPUSA, declaring that it’s “a cult” that pushes “extreme racist, misogynistic, anti culture points of view.”
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Uh, Oh, Virginia a Net Out-Migration State in 2025
Click here — U-Haul — to view interactive map. 
Virginia dropped from a net in-migration state in 2024 to a net out-migration state in 2025, according to the latest U-Haul Growth Index report. The Old Dominion dropped from a 17th rank in net in-migration to 36th. The net loss was narrow though, only 0.2 percentage points. I’d love to see a regional breakdown — how much of the back-pedaling occurred in Northern Virginia (not including Fredericksburg, which was one of the top growth cities in the U.S.)?
Do readers have any prognostications for how Virginia will fare under Governor Abigail Spanberger?
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The Supreme Court Case that Could Raise Your Internet Bill or Let Piracy Run Amok
Image credit; John Farmer using ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking by John Farmer
Ponder this question: You run a business such as a company, university, coffee shop, or hospital that provides internet access to many people. Of course, some people use it to access pirated content, such as NFL games, movies, or songs. Are you at risk that your internet service provider (ISP) will cut off your business even though many of your users don’t break the law?
Also, rights holders might identify and contact your business, demanding that you disconnect offending users. Must you disconnect them? Can you give the scofflaws multiple warnings before cutting them off?
Case before the U.S. Supreme CourtThat’s what’s at stake in a case in which the Supreme Court just heard oral argument – a case with Virginia connections in which an ISP was held responsible for not cutting off customers engaged in repeated piracy and hit with a judgment for $1 billion. This case could have a major impact on the price of Internet service and perhaps on available download speeds.
A group of record labels, including Sony Music Entertainment, brought this case against Cox Communications, an ISP, in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
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A Break in Tradition
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Jeffrey Katz, retired Chesterfield County Chief of Police and now Gov.-elect’s pick for Superintendent of State Police Photo credit: Richmond Times Dispatch Gov.-elect Spanberger has broken new ground with one of her agency appointments. She recently announced the appointment of Jeffrey Katz to be the Superintendent of State Police. Katz was formerly the chief of police in Chesterfield County. After retiring from that position in 2024, he joined the FBI, where he worked in the training division. Before being named chief of police by Chesterfield in 2018, he had worked in law enforcement in Florida.
This is a big deal for the State Police. The Superintendent of State police traditionally has been someone who has come up through the ranks. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that tradition dates back to at least 1994. Katz will replace Col. Matthew Hanley, a 20-year veteran of the State Police, whom Youngkin elevated to the position last February.
There has been a suggestion that unease in the General Assembly about State Police’s management of its budget may have been a factor in Spanberger bringing in an outsider. After Hanley reported last fall that it was going to be a “lean” budget year and he had ordered a halt to all discretionary expenses, Democrats in the State Senate began asking for details of all aspects of the agency’s budget and spending. Bill Carrico, former State Senator and retired State Trooper and director of the Virginia State Police Association, noted that that action “put a target” on the back of the agency. Nevertheless, regarding Katz, Carrico said, “He’s a very intelligent man. I don’t think it’ll take him long to get his feet wet. I really respect the man and like him. I think he’ll do fine.”
There is a strong culture in the State Police. Whether bringing in an outsider will result in changes in that culture remains to be seen.
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AI and the New Cultural Revolution
The United States is undergoing a cultural revolution. Artificial Intelligence is giving Middle America the tools to circumvent the entertainment monopoly of the bicoastal elites. You can find content on YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and Facebook every bit as fun and/or entrancing as anything you can see on Netflix, Apple, or network TV. Just as new media has destroyed the monopoly authority of legacy media, the legacy arbiters and gatekeepers of popular culture are losing their power to dictate what America watches and listens to. A new generation of creative artists is arising.
Watch the AI-generated video above. It’s hilarious (at least if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan). Nothing like this ever came out of Hollywood. (Neural Derp is the brainchild of Taylor Mittelstadt of Gulf Breeze, Fla.) We’ll be seeing a lot more like this. The titans of Tinseltown should be quaking in their Guccis.
As Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. The culture is changing. Middle America is empowered. Give it a few years, and the politics will reflect it.
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John Reid Returns
After his bid for lieutenant governor, John Reid is back in the talk show business. You don’t have to live within range of WRVA radio signals to hear him. You can listen to his show on YouTube.
