Category Archives: Taxes

By Steve Haner

The fight that is about to occur at the Assembly’s reconvened session on Wednesday is entirely about taxes, not about spending.

An analysis of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s proposed compromise budget – done by the Democrats’ favorite financial bean counters, not by conservatives – confirms his budget comes extremely close to the spending levels Democrats approved at the end of the General Assembly.  The gap compared to the $188 billion overall budget is little more than a rounding error.

For K-12 education, the gap between the two budgets is a few hundred million dollars out of an overall education budget of $24 billion. As you review the list of detailed comparisons made by the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, item after item is the same as in the budget approved in March. That includes funding for healthy teacher and state employee raises the Democrats were so proud to include.

In other cases where the Democrats expanded spending, the Governor accepted 50-75% of what they approved. He pays for some capital projects with debt instead of cash and utilizes money from the Literary Fund for retirement premiums, both legal and common strategies used in the budget for decades. Governors of both parties have done those often. Continue reading →

Gov. Glenn Youngkin

By Steve Haner

Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) is offering a compromise on the disputed state budget that gives Virginia’s Democratic legislators most of the spending they were initially demanding, especially for local schools and early childhood education. The Governor is also offering a quick path to a resolution that avoids additional months of budget stalemate and political division.

“On a day when Virginians were thrilled to witness an 80% eclipse of the sun, they should also cheer a budget compromise where a Republican governor moved about that far in the direction of meeting the Democrats’ stated goals without added taxes,” stated Derrick Max, President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute. “This is a more than reasonable good faith offer, recognizing that in a divided government, compromise is key.” Continue reading →

Not a visual that communicates the Democrats are leading an army in this fight. It screams loneliness.

By Steve Haner

A senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee just called the Governor of Virginia a spoiled brat, which of course became a headline. Is everybody getting the nonsense out of their systems? It is time for the grown-ups to intervene or we will be stuck in a stupid loop until July.

The state budget as it passed a few weeks ago will not stand. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) will either impose line-item vetoes that drastically reduce the available revenue, or he will veto the entire $188 billion document. He has sufficient votes behind him to sustain those vetoes.

That Governor Youngkin would never accept an expansion of the sales tax to digital items on its own, without compensating tax reductions of some sort, has been obvious throughout this process. Democrats knew that. Expanding the tax to cover a host of business-to-business transactions, as well, was an intentional act of political arson by the Democrats. They knew all along it would never stand. They are begging for a veto for reasons hard to fathom.

Think back just one year, just one single year. Can anybody imagine Fairfax Democrats Richard Saslaw or Janet Howell building their budget on a tax proposal that has the Northern Virginia technology industry on the warpath? Can you see them proudly touting an effort to, as I put it earlier, kill the digital goose for its golden egg? These are not only not our fathers’ Democrats; these are not 2023’s Democrats. Continue reading →

By Steve Haner

Pick any member of the General Assembly at random, stop them in the grocery store for a chat, and quiz them about the digital sales tax they approved a week ago Saturday.  It will quickly become clear that most had no idea what they were voting for when they approved it.

What will the tax add to the cost of your Amazon Prime or Netflix? (For most, 6-7%.) Will the tax be collected on both the monthly fee and on anything extra you download?  (Yes) Will it add to the cost of preparing your tax to file online, your annual lease for Microsoft programs on your laptop or your security system program? (Yes, most digitally-based services will all be taxable to individuals, and many of them will be taxable to businesses. If you are doing something on a computer or phone that costs money, it is likely to become taxable.) 

Even for a business, if some software package its employees use includes a combination of online services, will it owe tax on the entire package? (Yes, unless the vendor is willing to break apart the bill, which many may refuse to do. That is because of the new language about taxing bundled services.)  If an out of state vendor does not add tax to the invoice, taxpayers will be required to calculate and pay it as a use tax, with auditors ready to pounce if they don’t.   

Think of engineering, law, banking, or medicine.  So many of their processes are now controlled by expensive software, most of which is about to be 6-7% more expensive.  At the shipyard in Newport News, paper blueprints and printed job instructions were replaced with tablets and digital design programs years ago.   Continue reading →

Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation

By Steve Haner

The last time the General Assembly made a similar mistake with the Virginia tax code was 20 years ago. It was 2004, and the complaints that business was not “paying its fair share” came from Republicans in the House. They introduced and quickly pushed through a bill that stripped sales tax exemptions from multiple categories of business. Sound familiar?

Twenty years later the only thing that has changed is that the bad idea is now coming from Senate Democrats. The anti-business rhetoric sounds the same. The sales or use taxes of up to 6-7% they seek to impose on business-to-business digital transactions (goods and services) will reach into every Virginia company, large and small. It will simply be passed along in higher prices. The only winners are their out-of-state competitors who have no such taxes in their states. Continue reading →