Category: Government Finance
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The Latest Federal COVID Money Pot
By Dick Hall-Sizemore The federal COVID money keeps rolling into the Commonwealth. According to the Secretary of Finance, as of January 13, it was estimated that the state would receive $2.4 billion from the stimulus bill passed by Congress in late December (the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA)). Unlike the earlier COVID…
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How the CARES Funding is Being Allocated
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Upon Jim Bacon’s suggestion, Jim Sherlock and I have taken on the task of looking closer at the federal COVID money that is coming the Commonwealth’s way and trying to discern how it is being spent. Unfortunately, this is not an analysis one finds in the general news media. We have taken…
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Senate Taxes Less PPP, House Bill Almost All
by Steve Haner First published this yesterday by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Majorities in both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly agree with Governor Ralph Northam and have voted to tax the federal Payroll Protection Plan grants that saved Virginia jobs in the pandemic. They only remain at odds over how much…
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Federal COVID Funding to Virginia K-12 Schools
by James C. Sherlock The federal government allocated a great deal of money in each of two different pieces of legislation in 2020 to provide COVID-related relief to K-12 schools. I will endeavor here to explain briefly what that means to Virginia. The two pieces of 2020 federal legislation that provide funding to K-12 schools…
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Unlikely to Go Well – Unimaginable Amounts of COVID-Related Money and the Rush to Spend It
by James C. Sherlock The federal government is charged to distribute $7 trillion in supplemental COVID-related supplemental funding already appropriated or pending. Real money, and we will have borrowed every penny. Hard to comprehend that much money. That is 7 million million dollars. I will try here to reduce that to human scale. At full…
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State Tax on PPP Grants Reduced Only Slightly
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…
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Virginia K-12 Spending Trends
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…
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Is Virginia a Low Tax State? It Depends on What You Measure.
by James A. Bacon The Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission has updated its scoreboard comparing Virginia on key metrics to other states — a project championed by Sen. Tim Kaine when he was governor. The idea was to allow Virginians to track the progress of the commonwealth in comparison to peer states on the…
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PPP Tax May Focus on Larger Employers Only
by Steve Haner A week ago, Governor Ralph Northam’s Administration was adamant that it would be unfair, in fact a double tax benefit, to allow Virginia employers with forgiven Paycheck Protection Plan loans to also deduct any expenses used to qualify for forgiveness. This week, the position changed. Maybe it would make sense to allow it…
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Proposed Standards of Quality Changes and Their Fiscal Impact
by James C. Sherlock This essay will present the changes proposed to Virginia public school Standards of Quality proposed by the Board of Education and put forward in identical School Equity and Staffing Act bills in the General Assembly. They represent very significant change. I have annotated each change in law in that bill…
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Reward Teacher Heroes, Not Those Who Stayed Home
by James A. Bacon In his state of the Commonwealth speech last night, Governor Ralph Northam made some proposals worth cheering and some that bear closer scrutiny. I’ll get to them in future posts. But one remark in particular stands out as totally wrong-headed — the idea, in the year of COVID-19, of giving every…
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Virginia’s COVID Federal Grants Now At $5.8 Billion
By Steve Haner Having received and mostly spent $3.1 billion in federal COVID-19 “relief” funding already, Virginia’s state and local governments now will have another $2.7 billion in the fourth and latest (but likely not last) federal spending bill tied to the ongoing pandemic and unemployment crisis. The word relief is in apostrophes because Virginia’s state budget,…
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Welcome to the New Year, Same as the Old Year
by James A. Bacon Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, my wife and friends and I tossed confetti, tooted our noisemakers and welcomed in a new year. Twenty twenty, we all agreed, couldn’t possibly be worse than 2019. It didn’t take long to disabuse us of that notion. First came the coronavirus. Then the George…
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Another Major Judicial System Reform
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Perhaps the most surprising item in the Governor’s recently-presented budget bill was the proposal to increase the size of the Virginia Court of Appeals by four judges, from 11 to 15. It is certainly one of the most controversial. The Republicans immediately decried the proposal as “court packing”. As usual, the issue…
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Healthcare Spending Drives Growth in Virginia Budget over Last 10 Years
by James C. Sherlock On December 16, the Director of the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget provided a briefing for the Joint Meeting of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, the House Appropriations Committee, and the House Finance Committee. The subject was the Governor’s proposed amendments to the 2020-2022 Biennial Budget. The Governor submitted…