by James A. Bacon
Governor Glenn Youngkin announced Friday that Virginia closed out FY 2024 with $1.2 billion more revenues than forecast. Needless to say, every dollar of surplus is spoken for, and none of it is going to taxpayers. The money will fund a list of “contingent” spending priorities — clean water projects, college tuition for military survivors and dependents, and improvements to Interstate 81.
Lost in the headlines of what is happening in the here and now is how much state government spending has ballooned over the past two decades. Between fiscal 2007 and 2025 (our current year) total state spending (General Fund and Non General Fund) has increased 139 percent. That compares to 50 percent inflation over the same period.
More money for Medicaid. More money for K-12 schools. More higher-ed tuition dollars. More taxes for transportation. What do we get for all that money?
Look at us. Our society is a mess. K-12 student achievement is a wreck. Health outcomes are deteriorating. Traffic congestion is as bad as ever. Universities have become engines of social revolution, not learning. Virginia’s economic performance, once stellar compared to other states, is mediocre. Housing is unaffordable, suicides are up, drug-overdose deaths are probing new highs. And the list of “unmet needs” is as long as it’s ever been.
I don’t blame Youngkin for this state of affairs. I don’t think things have gotten much better on his watch, but he’s fighting a losing battle with a Democratic Party in control of a General Assembly that’s as addicted to government spending as a drug addict is to fentanyl.
To modern-day Democrats, every ill in society calls for a government intervention, which entails more spending; yet no matter how much money we spend, things never seem to get better. I’m old enough to remember 60 years of Great Society promises that never came true. Just one more government program will do it. Just one more… and one more… and one more.
With $1.5-trillion-a-year deficits and a $35 trillion national debt, the federal government is heading for system failure. There is little indication that Virginia will serve as a backstop when the inevitable fiscal reckoning comes.
Virginia’s political and cultural elites have no more awareness of fiscal limits than their national counterparts, and no more interest in finding out. They don’t dismantle programs that don’t work. They just let them accumulate like barnacles on the keel and move on to the next costly, headline-driven obsession.
Does anybody feel good about all this? Does anybody think Virginians are better off?
No. Poverty, inequality and social dysfunction persist. That has created an opening for the progressives who now animate the Democrat Party. According to the progressive narrative, the reason 60 years of expanded government programs have failed to make things better is that systemic racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and class oppression were integral to the nation’s founding. Progressives have abandoned the Democrats’ old idea of trying to make government work better. They want to tear it all down and “reimagine” everything from law enforcement and education to healthcare and the energy system.
That’s where decades of ceding responsibility for addressing every so-called social “need” to government has gotten us. Forget personal responsibility. Forget civil society. Forget moral awakenings. Only government can solve it.
Perhaps I over-generalize. Reality is complex; there are many currents, cross-currents and eddies. But whatever your explanation for runaway spending, and whomever you blame for it, two facts are indisputable: state spending is vastly bigger than it’s ever been — and the backlog of unfunded spending priorities remains undiminished.
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