Bacon's Rebellion

  • Why Did Tax Bill Die? It’s a Governor’s Bill!

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    Delegate Joe McNamara

    By Steve Haner

    Virginia will remain out of step with the rest of the United States on how it taxes service-providing businesses after General Assembly Democrats voted in lockstep to once again kill a logical income tax reform.  

    There was absolutely no partisan angle to the policy debate, yet party line votes killed it. It is impossible not to consider that one fatal flaw for the idea was that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin supported it and suggested the Assembly make the change.  But the idea has been knocking around for years, long before Youngkin. A respected tax department official told the House Finance Committee she had been working on the issue for 15 years. 

    “It shifts the burden from in-state companies to out-of-state companies,” Kristin Collins of the Department of Taxation told legislators.  You would think this would be a bipartisan winner.  

    The tax rule Democrats rejected by defeating House Bill 1866 in House Finance on January 31 has been adopted by at least 39 of the 48 states that have corporate income taxes. The senate version, Senate Bill 1456, was killed January 28.  

    Most of the states Virginia competes against for business locations and expansions use what is called “market based sourcing” in calculating the tax on income from services. According to the fiscal impact statement prepared by the Department of Taxation (very detailed, as usual) “none of the states contacted reported an unexpected revenue loss as a result of market-based sourcing.” 

    (more…)

  • VCU Loses DEI Grant

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    James A. Bacon

    Virginia Commonwealth University is one of three universities to have a federal grant canceled in the latest step by the Trump administration to defund Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

    The education schools of VCU, California State University-Los Angeles and the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota had received a series of grants under a larger $1 billion Biden administration initiative. Reports The Washington Free Beacon:

    Ostensibly meant for teacher training and development, the grants were in fact used to support courses and workshops on DEI concepts—including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “linguistic supremacy”—as well as the establishment of a “social justice” center.

    The VCU education school, which has explicitly included “social justice” in its mission statement, hosted workshops on “decolonizing the curriculum” and “becoming an antiracist educator.”

    (more…)

  • Political Infighting Over VMI’s Board of Visitors Puts Cadets at Risk

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    James A. Bacon

    Lightning strikes VMI. Image credit: The Cadet

    — The Cadet editorial staff

    The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) has long stood as a symbol of discipline, leadership, and service. However, recent political disputes over Board of Visitors (BOV) appointments have placed cadets in the crossfire of a battle they neither sought nor deserved.

    Former BOV President Tom Watjen, who remains on the Executive Committee, lamented the July 2024 appointees, stating, “I am disappointed in how politicized the board appointment process has become, impacting board experience and continuity.” His concern extends beyond VMI—politicizing governance at the expense of cadets undermines the Institute’s core mission.

    Dedicated Leaders Denied Without Justification

    Two highly qualified and committed alumni, Quintin Elliott ’85 and Clifford Foster ’93 were appointed to the BOV by Governor Glenn Youngkin in July 2024. VMI Superintendent Maj Gen. Cedric Wins praised their appointments, noting, “Each individual brings a unique set of skills and experiences that will help us continue to move the Institute forward.” Despite their strong credentials, the Virginia Senate rejected their appointments, with the House expected to follow suit, leaving the BOV short of experienced leadership just before one of its three annual meetings.

    (more…)

  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • Reassessment Blues

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    I just opened my reassessment notice from Henrico County. The assessment of my house is 13.5 percent higher than it was last year!

    It is not a grand or fancy house. Just a brick Cape Cod with about 1,300 sq.ft, built in 1955.

    It is not the house; it is the neighborhood. Houses stay on the market only a few days and there are almost several offers, many above the listing price. The house next to me sold last year for almost half a million dollars. It too is a brick Cape Cod, but it has a family room addition that mine does not have and it has been extensively renovated inside. In addition, it has a detached garage. None of that applies to me. Nevertheless, that selling price undoubtedly had an effect on my assessment.

    If my house could sell for what the county says it is worth, I understand why so many people are having trouble finding something they can afford.

  • Bacon Meme of the Week

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

  • A Purge Victim Speaks

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Stanley Goldfarb

    One victim of the Democrats’ winnowing of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointments to state boards and commissions this year was Stanley Goldfarb. The General Assembly nixed 13 appointees in all — an unprecedented number in modern Virginia history, I believe. Most, like Goldfarb, were outspoken conservatives who had demonstrated a willingness to speak out against the “progressive” project in Virginia higher-ed.

    Youngkin’s other appointees have kept a low profile for fear of triggering retaliation of exactly the sort that occurred this year. But not Goldfarb. He paid the price for his views. But he was not silenced. He let it all hang out in a column published this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

    Youngkin appointed Goldfarb, the founder of the Do No Harm medical organization that combats wokery in the medical field, to the Board of Visitors of Old Dominion University in June. A former associate dean of curriculum of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, he brought impressive credentials to the task. He took his job as board member seriously. And he ran into a brick wall.

    The story he tells is shocking. Having observed similar treatment of activist board members at the University of Virginia, though, I don’t find it surprising. When it comes to conservative reformers, ODU’s leadership, like those of many other public Virginia universities, adheres to the mushroom school of management: Keep ’em in the dark, and feed ’em… you know what.

    Goldfarb was naive enough to think that he might have something to offer ODU, which had recently absorbed the Eastern Virginia School of Medicine (EVMS) and had no institutional experience managing a medical school. He was particularly interested in understanding how the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion ideology had permeated the institution.

    He never got the chance.

    (more…)

  • CVOW One of Four Wind Projects Not Frozen By Trump. Yet.

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    by Steve Haner

    Dominion Energy Virginia’s current offshore wind construction project is one of only four still in the process of building towers and turbines in the wake of an executive order from President Donald Trump.  It is also the largest of the survivors, with more planned power output than the other three combined.

    Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) will include 176 turbines and several offshore substations, with a nameplate value of 2,600 megawatts. The other projects still underway at this time are Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts (806 MW), Revolution Wind serving Rhode Island and Connecticut (704 MW) and Sunrise Wind, a New York project with 924 MW.

    Vineyard Wind’s construction was interrupted last summer by a defective 351-foot turbine blade that shattered and scattered debris far and wide. Now it is dealing with the revelation that more than 60 additional blades from supplier GE Vernova have a similar flaw and will need to be replaced. 

    Dominion continues to report a smooth construction process but has announced a cost overrun of $900 million in recent days. Perhaps the thing to note is that Dominion’s project is the only survivor under construction that has among its backers a sitting Republican governor. The other three are in deep blue states. It is also the only one to be owned directly by the utility (now with a non-controlling partner) and thus guaranteed by its captive ratepayers.

    (more…)

  • The Provost Search Is On

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Now comes the battle to replace the University of VIrginia’s provost Ian Baucom. The University has assembled a 14-person group to launch a national search, according to an announcement in the UVA house organ UVA Today.

    Ian Baucom

    The announcement attributed the appointments vaguely to “the University of Virginia,” without identifying specifically who made the selection. An educated guess is that President Jim Ryan picked the members of the search committee, perhaps in consultation with Rector Robert Hardie, his close ally on the Board of Visitors. But that is only an inference.

    The announcement gave no clue what criteria “the university” would use in seeking a successor. Baucom was Ryan’s right-hand man who executed his “great and good” agenda to transform UVA in line with social-justice and equity principles. It would surprise no one if Ryan wanted a chief academic officer who would sustain that legacy.

    The selection of the second most powerful administrator at UVA could be contentious, however. It is not in the least melodramatic to suggest that the future of UVA’ hangs in the balance.

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  • A Tired Ryan Contemplates a Difficult Future

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    UVA President Jim Ryan. Image credit WVIR-TV.

    by James A. Bacon

    When University of Virginia President Jim Ryan appeared in a WVIR-TV interview in late January, he seemed fatigued. His brow was deeply furrowed and his face, already lean from marathon training, wore an expression of perpetual worry.

    The last few months have been the most trying time in Ryan’s six-and-a-half-year tenure. After enjoying tremendous initial success in implementing his priorities at UVA, he is now mired in endless controversies which threaten to unravel his legacy.

    In his early years under Democratic governors and a friendly Board of Visitors, Ryan advanced a sweeping “great and good” overhaul of the University based on the principles of social justice and equity: publication of the Racial Equity Task Force report, renaming of the Alderman Library, removal of the George Rogers Clarke statue, erection of a monument to enslaved laborers, expansion of a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy, imposition of DEI statements, steering tens of millions of dollars toward the recruitment of minority students, grad students and faculty, the stacking of faculty with far-left professors, and much more.

    It all came easily. Ryan was popular with students and faculty, the Board was cooperative, alumni were somnambulent, and after the 2020 George Floyd protests, he was in sync with the national vibe.

    But the vibe has changed, and the past few months have been a strain.

    (more…)

  • A $29 Billion Virginia Battery Bonanza, Unanimous in VA Senate

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    A 137 megawatt battery storage facility in California. The pending legislation would mandate about 30 such plants in Virginia.

    Based on current pricing for the present-day energy storage projects, legislation pending at the Virginia General Assembly could cost ratepayers of the two largest electric utilities between $18 billion and $29 billion over the next 20 years.  

    That capital cost, based on the current $300,000 to $500,000 price per megawatt hour for the massive utility scale battery projects, may not include the financing costs that always accompany such large construction projects.  Both utilities would expect their standard annual profit margin on the investments, as well.  What regulators call the revenue requirement will dwarf the numbers mentioned above.  It is the revenue requirement that drives the cost on customer bills.

    And for all that money the utilities would not create a single electron of additional electricity.  The batteries envisioned simply store energy created by a real generation plant, releasing it to the grid when needed (such as when the sun is not producing solar electricity, or the wind has deserted the ocean turbines.)  The cost of producing the electricity they store is on top of the cost of the batteries themselves.

    The Senate version (Senate Bill 1394) of the legislation passed unanimously, but neither it nor the House version (House Bill 2537) are fully through the Assembly process.  There is time to face the reality of what this would cost.  No official fiscal impact statement of any kind has been produced by the State Corporation Commission or the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation.  That is because not one of 140 legislators has even asked. 

    In an earlier article discussing the battery storage mandates, the figure of $500,000 per megawatt hour (MWh) in capital costs was used and was promptly challenged by an anonymous renewable energy fan in the comment string.  That person is probably not aware of the cost of some smaller battery projects already approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which make $500,000 per MWh look cheap.

    (more…)

  • Passing the Baton

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Chat GPT

    by James A. Bacon

    I’m old enough to remember — waaaay back in the early 1980s — when Richmond was the dominant business center in Virginia. But as editor of the start-up Virginia Business magazine in 1986, it quickly became apparent that the mega-trend business story of the era was the extraordinary economic and demographic growth of metropolitan Washington. I recall publishing a magazine running a cover story describing Northern Virginia as “The Suburb that Ate Virginia.” By the late 1980s, it wasn’t even a contest. Northern Virginia had become the commonwealth’s growth driver.

    And so it has been ever since. Fortune 500 companies began moving to NoVa. The tech sector boomed. The population swelled. Household incomes soared. Northern Virginia, which once was thought to extend from Washington to the Occoquan, now in the public imagination reaches to the Rappahannock. Somehow, NoVa’s economic dynamism persisted despite the challenges of soaring housing prices, strained infrastructure, and arguably the worst traffic congestion in the country.

    For four decades, Virginia’s state capital was left eating NoVA’s dust.

    Then, suddenly, around the time of the Covid pandemic, something changed. Northern Virginia, once a massive magnet for domestic in-migration, became an exporter. The population continued to grow thanks to a steady influx of foreigners, but more “domestic” migrants (people moving within the country) were leaving the region than arriving. Meanwhile, more domestic migrants were moving to the Richmond metropolitan area than ever.

    Citing the work of Hamilton Lombard, who runs the demographic research group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center, I’ve noted the sea change on this blog. Now the Richmond Times-Dispatch has taken belated notice that the baton of population and business growth has passed back to its hometown.

    In the past four years, Central Virginia has added more residents than any comparable period since the first census taken in 1790.

    (more…)

  • Interest-Rate Cap on Loans: Beware the Unintended Consequences

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Chat GPT

    by James A. Bacon

    A bill capping financial loans to a maximum of 12% interest passed the state Senate Monday. If enacted into law, Virginia would go from having one of the most permissive caps among the 50 states to perhaps the most stringent. The measure could have a debilitating effect on lending to people with low credit ratings, effectively shutting them out of legal lending markets.

    The most astonishing thing about SB 1252, sponsored by Senator Lamont Bagby, D-Richmond, is that it passed with significant Republican support. Only six Republicans voted against it; the rest voted for it, along with all the Democrats. If the measure passes the House as well, I hope that Governor Glenn Youngkin, who as a successful businessman has a basic grasp of economics, will veto it.

    The usual justification for capping interest rates is that high rates on credit cards, consumer loans, consolidation loans and payday loans can trap people on a treadmill of indebtedness, with interest charges piling up faster than borrowers can pay them off. To be sure, this is a real problem, and I don’t pretend it isn’t. The question is whether the cure is worse than the illness.

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  • Take That, TurboTax

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Each year when I finish using TurboTax to prepare my tax returns, I file my federal tax return electronically. However, in order to file my state tax return electronically, I have to pay extra. I refuse on principle. I print off the completed state return, sign it, put it in an envelope, and mail it to the Virginia Dept. of Taxation.

    I do this because I am still peeved about the state capitulating to the private tax preparation industry 15 years ago.

    For several years, the Commonwealth had a perfectly good system that enabled most residents to prepare and electronically submit their state tax returns. That changed with the passage of HB 1349 in 2010. The effect of that bill was to prohibit the Dept. of Taxation from operating a free preparation and filing system, available to all residents, and instead operate the Virginia Free File program. The legislation directs the state to “enter into a non-monetary agreement with companies in the electronic tax preparation and filing industry (the “Consortium for Virginia”) to work together to offer free, online tax return preparation and filing services to 70 percent of Virginia taxpayers with the lowest incomes.” For anyone interested, the Tax Department has provided an excellent, detailed history of this legislation and its aftermath in its fiscal impact statement for HB 2264.

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  • More Pathetic Excuses

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    AI-generated image of an MS-13 gang member. Needs mommy and daddy to help answer question about immigration status. Welcoming communities should embrace his humanity. And he commits crimes at lower rates than the rest of society.

    by James A. Bacon

    Democrats in the General Assembly are killing Republican bills right and left. In one incident that drew my jaundiced attention this morning, the Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted yesterday to spike a Republican-sponsored bill that would make it easier to deport convicted violent felons. I almost feel guilty writing about this. Mocking the people speaking against the proposal is easier than losing socks in the laundry.

    State law requires law enforcement authorities to check the immigration status of adults convicted of violent crimes. But the law does not require the same for juveniles, creating a loophole for youthful lawbreakers who enter correctional facilities as juveniles but are not released until after they have aged into adulthood. Senator Tara Durant, R-Fredericksburg, submitted SB 1268 to require authorities to check the immigration status of juveniles as well, and to forward that information to U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE).

    Sophia Gregg with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia countered that juveniles should not be questioned about their immigration status without a guardian present. “There is no reason that we should treat children the same way we treat adults,” The Virginia Mercury reports her as saying.

    Sheila Herlihy of the Virginia Interfaith Center said the interrogation of immigrants conflicted, in the Mercury’s words, with the values of welcoming communities.

    Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Prince William, called the legislation “unnecessary, duplicative, and a messaging bill,” and said that it unfairly vilified immigrant communities. “At the end of the day, the studies and statistics show that immigrants who do commit crimes commit them at a lower rate than the people who are actually here lawfully.”

    I am not making this up.

    (Bacon rubs his hands gleefully.) OK, let’s get to work.

    (more…)

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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