by Steve Haner
A Senate Committee voted today to reduce the amount of tax that Virginia will impose on the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) grants that saved Virginia jobs, but not by much. It remains clear many legislators think employers owe Virginia tax on those dollars.
Declining to tax the entire amount is being packaged as a gracious concession on the state’s part. (more…)
Relax, the headline is totally facetious. The Wason Center at Christopher Newport University is an independent organization that values its integrity. It is not doing push polling for Democrats. But you’ve got to wonder if the results would have been any different if the two had been working in sync.
Here’s the question Wason asked in a poll the results of which were released yesterday: “If you were making up the budget for the Virginia state government this year, would you increase, decrease or keep spending the same for…”
by James A. Bacon
In our never-ending quest to provide Virginia citizens the data they can use to hold their public officials accountable, Bacon’s Rebellion ranks Virginia’s school districts by the number of days short they fell from the 180-day standard enshrined in state law. Between the COVID-19 epidemic and Governor Ralph Northam’s spring break shutdown order, it was a challenging year. To be sure, uncertainty was rampant and school boards had tough decisions to make. But some school districts did a superior job to others in keeping the classrooms open for students.
According to data extracted from the 2019-2020 State Superintendent’s Report, Buckingham County had the smallest shortfall — 41 days. The City of Galax had the biggest — 68 days. This is only one metric to use in gauging your school board’s performance, but it’s an important one. Demand answers!
For a list of all school districts in Virginia… (more…)
by James C. Sherlock
As I have studied and reported upon Virginia’s struggles in COVID response, many things have come into focus that need to be done better in healthcare. I have reported on a lot of them here and called for changes.
One major, overarching flaw needs attention.
Virginia’s physicians and nurses do not have sufficient influence over health laws, policy, regulations, Department of Health oversight or health programs. Physicians and nurses as organized groups largely were neither consulted or listened to in COVID response policy. If you doubt it, ask them. They are beyond frustrated.
When you needed a COVID vaccination, were you able to get one from your doctor or nurse practitioner? Didn’t think so.
I will recommend here a way to change the balance of influence. It is important to all Virginians that it indeed be altered. (more…)
By Dick Hall-Sizemore
Governor Northam is moving to increase the amount of business that goes to companies owned by women or minorities.
A little background would help put the pending legislation into perspective. There have long been programs at the federal, state, and local levels that serve to give some preferences to small businesses, as well as to businesses owned by women and minorities. These programs have generally been upheld by the courts. Indeed, one of the leading cases in this area arose out of a suit brought in Virginia—City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Company, 488 U.S. 469 (1989). The case law surrounding this issue is fairly complicated. A summary can be found here in the recent diversity report commissioned by the Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity (DSBSD). A more detailed analysis can be found here in an earlier report. (more…)
by James A. Bacon
Amazon has unveiled the design for one of the buildings on its East Coast headquarters campus in Arlington: a 350-foot-tall structure modeled on a double helix. With trees.
Architectural firm NBBJ says it aspires to reflect nature’s fondness for the helix in structures from DNA to the Milky Way Galaxy. But the design reminds some commentators, observes The Washington Post, of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Tower of Babel” painting… or the poop emoji. To me, it resembles a giant wood screw. (more…)
by Kerry Dougherty
Ready for some good news out of Richmond?
Thought so.
On Tuesday, SB 1303, which will require all Virginia public schools to open for in-person as well as virtual classes, passed the Democrat-controlled Senate overwhelmingly on a BI-PARTISAN VOTE of 26-13.
Let’s hear it for politicians putting kids ahead of party!
The bill was introduced by State Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant of Henrico. She’s a Republican OB-GYN, by the way.
After what’s been described as “impassioned” debate, seven Democrats joined all of the Senate’s Republicans in voting for the measure.
No one sat this one out.
by Asra Q. Nomani
Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge John Tran denied a request by 15 local parents to force Fairfax County Public Schools to reinstate race-blind, merit-based admissions tests to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, America’s No. 1 high school, but clearly stood on the side of the parents in their noble defense of gifted education and the value of merit-based admissions.
The decision is a blow to the future of the school as a place that nurtures the area’s top science. technology, engineering and math students, as local educrats replace the test with an essential popularity contest, complete with scoring for students who best match a subjective “Portrait of a Graduate,” complete with race-based quotas and biases for life “experiences.”
But hundreds of local parents — most of them immigrant — scored a huge win for America in waging a months-long battle, complete with school board speeches, petitions, letters and direct action protests, in an effort that is not over. They overcame fear of retaliation and cultural traumas of coming from societies where speaking out is punishable by death.
Theirs is a victory for standing up for their belief in the American Dream. The judicial setback just proves that the war for America and its future will be a long one. (more…)
by James C. Sherlock
We all like to discuss the politics of things. That in many instances is appropriate. But political leadership is neither the problem nor the solution I will discuss here today.
We will spend every day between now and November’s election debating how the politicians responded to COVID. And we should. But our state government has failed both us and our elected leaders.
I submit that the failures of the bureaucracies would have crippled elected officials from either party. We need desperately to fix the laws, regulations and bureaucratic structures that harbor such failures as permanently as we are able.
I will suggest a path.
What needs to be done?
I wrote in late March in praise of Virginia’s pandemic influenza emergency plan and published key details the next day. Two days later I discovered the coverup. The plan had been removed from public view on state websites, never to be heard of again. (more…)
Teachers and other self-proclaimed school advocates in Richmond plan to assemble on a footbridge over the Bellevue Overpass this evening and hold up giant electrified letters spelling out “Fund Our Schools.” It’s a clever media ploy that will guarantee great visuals for photographers and television crews, and undoubtedly it will gin up lots of uncritical coverage about the need for school funding.
It falls to Bacon’s Rebellion to provide the fiscal context. Here is some data just published on the state’s “Virginia Compared” website comparing spending, revenue and outcomes data for Virginia in comparison to the other states.
by Chris Braunlich
Candidates love to be on the side of the gods – and supporting reduced pollution and greater economic growth is a “win-win.” After all, if Virginia can use new technologies to reduce not only greenhouse gases but also what we send to landfills … while simultaneously creating new, well-paying jobs, who could oppose it?
Technological advances like those invested in by Elon Musk or Google have simultaneously lowered costs and reduced environmental threats for years. But some seem determined to have ideology stand in the way of common sense.
In 2018, more than 35 million tons of plastic municipal waste was produced: only three million tons were recycled; another five million were used for energy production. By far, the greatest amount of plastic waste was simply dumped — American landfills received 27 million tons of plastics because one of the greatest current drawbacks of recycling plastic is … it can’t all be recycled easily or efficiently. (more…)
by James A. Bacon
In censuring Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, the Senate of Virginia has established new rules for acceptable political behavior and rhetoric. The rules are always changing, so it’s important to keep up or risk being consigned to the netherworld of the political undead.
You can read the censure here. Do not misinterpret what follows as a defense of Chase. She’s destroying Virginia’s Republican Party with her antics and hyperbolic language, and she has brought much of this obloquy upon herself. Rather, take the recitation of the charges listed in the censure as signs of a phenomenon even more disturbing than Chase: evidence of how the political Left in Virginia increasingly dictates the rules of acceptable political discourse and to whom the rules apply.
Charge #1: Chase berated a Capitol Police officer on duty when the Senator was not given access to a restricted parking area in front of the Capitol. She addressed the officer profanely and made offensive remarks to the Clerk of the Senate. She suggested the officer had been racially motivated in reaction to the Senator’s “white privilege.”
New rules: Profanity and rudeness now are grounds for censure. So is imputing racial prejudice to a person of another race…. depending upon the race in question. (more…)
by Kerry Dougherty
The Federalist, one of my daily must-read news sources, had a great piece yesterday. It supported my point of view, naturally.
And it’s timely as Michael Osterholm, one of Biden’s advisors, predicted Sunday that lockdowns will return with a vengeance once the U.K. variant of Covid-19 becomes dominant in the United States.
In “Covid Lockdowns Were An Overreaction to Protect The Rich ,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of America’s outspoken opponents of many measures taken during the pandemic, joined Megyn Kelly in a podcast to discuss the results of shutdowns around the U.S. They affirmed what has been glaringly obvious to anyone paying attention: Lockdowns protected the rich while putting the poor in harm’s way.
I noticed this early on in the pandemic when friends of mine on Facebook were hash-tagging the hell out of slogans like #JustStayHome.
Easy for them, when they weren’t missing a paycheck and had work-from-home jobs. (more…)
by Steve Haner
Six bills which reverse 15 years of Dominion Energy Virginia legislative dominance advanced out of a House of Delegates subcommittee today, setting up the strongest challenge to the utility’s profits and power in decades.
Most in one form or another restore authority to the State Corporation Commission to use its own discretion in reviewing the company’s earnings, profits, and accounting decisions in a rate case due to begin in April. It will be the first such review since 2015 and will cover four years of company operations, 2017 through 2020. (more…)
by James A. Bacon
I have consistently supported the expansion of solar energy in Virginia, at least up to a point where it doesn’t compromise the reliability of the electric grid. When up-front capital costs and fuel costs are taken into account, solar is the lowest cost source of electricity in Virginia. Furthermore, as a supporter of property rights, I believe that rural landowners should be free to contract with developers to build solar farms on parcels that might otherwise lie fallow or go underutilized. Building solar farms potentially could put hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of rural landowners.
But I understand why people in rural Virginia get up in arms when big solar developers want to blanket thousands of acres with solar panels. I don’t necessarily agree with their proposed remedies, but I do understand.
Virginia’s urban/rural divide is becoming more pronounced than ever. That divide is most visible in voting results and electoral maps that show a vast geographic expanse of “red” Virginia compared to concentrated, highly populated clusters in “blue” Virginia. Views differ on a wide range of issues from gun rights and abortion to taxes and climate change. (more…)
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.
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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