Category: Business and Economy
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“Quarantine Leave” Bill Exempts State Employees
By Steve Haner Employees caught in this pandemic with no paid time off for health issues have been in a deep bind, and many of those with reasonable leave available have probably burned it all. It is one of several problems exacerbated by this government-led economic crash. Congress, in a bipartisan response supported by President…
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Job Recovery Is Not the Special Session’s Focus
By Steve Haner With the Virginia General Assembly’s “Cops and COVID” special session moving into its third week, it seems likely to impede rather than assist the state’s economic recovery from the pandemic. It may also greatly expand COVID-19’s financial burdens in the years to come. The highly publicized issues of unpaid rents and utility…
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Is Green Hydrogen the Answer?
By Peter Galuszka Utilities, including Dominion Energy, are increasingly exploring the use of now-costly hydrogen technology to produce electricity with little or no carbon. One of the most promising uses involves using excess renewable electricity from solar farms or wind turbines to power electrolyzer devices that strip hydrogen away from oxygen in water. The hydrogen…
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COVID-19’s Long-Term Changes in Virginia
by DJ Rippert In the long run… Over the past eight months COVID-19 has dramatically impacted the world, the United States and Virginia. One hundred and twenty thousand cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Virginia Over 2,500 people have died from COVID-19 . The cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to grow in the Old…
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Maybe We Can Sue
by James C. Sherlock Updated August 30, 3:30 pm I wrote yesterday about a House of Delegates bill that ultimately was passed by the House Committee for Courts of Justice as House Bill No. 5074 Amendment In the Nature of A Substitute (the bill). I wrote of its effects on public officials and owners…
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Voters Oppose Contracts That Protect Bad Cops
By Steve Haner As yet another bitter conflict over a police officer’s use of deadly force divides America, this time a case in Wisconsin, Virginia’s General Assembly forges ahead with opening up the state to the police unions that usually rush to protect their members from discipline or dismissal. The Kenosha Professional Police Association was…
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For Virginia, Nobody’s Home in the Congressional Infrastructure and Appropriations Committees
by James C. Sherlock Incredible and statistically unlikely as it sounds, the Commonwealth of Virginia has not a single member on either of the Congressional House or Senate Committees that decide what infrastructure projects are authorized, or on either Appropriations Committee that decides what is spent on such projects and on everything else. Those projects…
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If You Pay Full Price for Flood Insurance, Ask our City/County Manager Why
by James C. Sherlock There were lots of comments in my last post about government programs to mitigate flooding damage in flood plains, specifically about buying and tearing down houses that repeatedly flood. One of the carrots to do so is Community Rating System (CRS) discounts to flood insurance in communities that take an active…
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Boomergeddon vs Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
by DJ Rippert Saving America’s bacon. In 2010 Jim Bacon, blogrunner of this site, wrote a book titled Boomergeddon. The sub-title of the book is, “How Runaway Deficits and the Age Wave Will Bankrupt the Federal Government and Devastate Retirement for Baby Boomers Unless We Act Now.” The book is well written and contains considerable…
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UVa Grad Students Want to Unionize
by James A. Bacon A group of University of Virginia employees comprised mainly of graduate students want to form a union, reports the Daily Progress. If successful, the workers would be affiliated with the Campus Workers of America. UVa last year committed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, so economic issues don’t…
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The Trash Tax Returns; Energy Price Hikes Ignored
By Steve Haner Proving once again how rare are the new ideas, Governor Ralph Northam’s proposed Special Session budget amendments resurrect a possible state-collected solid waste tipping fee, which crashed and burned in 2002 after being successfully tagged a “trash tax.” The proposal calls for a study to be completed by November 1, laying the…
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Northam Asks Legislators: Resist Urge to Spend
By Steve Haner Perhaps the most important point about Governor Ralph Northam’s latest Virginia state budget proposal is what he did not recommend. He did not recommend dipping into the state’s current cash reserves to restore spending items which had been frozen. No additional taxes are proposed. In fact, Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne told…
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Entrepreneurs, Rent Seekers and the Just Society
by James A. Bacon It’s a lazy, rainy day, and for amusement, I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s online work, “Principia Politica,” in which he applies his insights into risk, probability, and the non-linearity of complex systems to the realm of governance and politics. The graphic displayed above appears about halfway through the presentation without…
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COVID Workers Comp On House Democrat Bill List
By Steve Haner The coming Special Session of the General Assembly will be narrowly focused but filled with controversy, based on the legislative wish list just released by House of Delegates Democrats. Only two bills listed fall outside of the major categories of “COVID-19 Relief” or “Criminal Justice and Police Reform.” Under the heading “COVID…
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Closing the Digital Divide More Imperative than Ever
by James A. Bacon As K-12 schools, community colleges and universities shift ever more learning online, the so-called “digital divide” — disparate access to high-speed Internet access and computers — is looming as a bigger problem than ever before. A new analysis by the State Council on Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) finds that more…