Category: Government Finance
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Early Budget News: Some K-12 Moderation
Well, it looks like the many forecasts of doom and budget profligacy on this blog were in vain. According to this morning’s RTD, Governor Northam will be asking for an additional $1.2 billion over two years for K-12. That is about half of the total cost of earlier projections of SOQ benchmarking costs and the…
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The Mo’ Money Mountain Grows Ever Bigger
In his latest budgetary proposal, Governor Ralph Northam has proposed returning $733 million to Virginia taxpayers… Oh, wait a minute. I guess I misread the announcement. It seems he’s proposing $733 million in new spending to protect the environment and fight climate change. That’s on top of advocating Virginia’s entry into the Regional Greenhouse Gas…
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Inmates Need Costly Medical Care, Too
by Dick Hall-Sizemore In the most recently completed fiscal year, the general fund cost to provide medical care to Virginia prison inmates was $221.6 million. That is a lot of money by any measure; it exceeds the entire budget of all but a few state agencies. However, despite its size, it does not get much…
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This Little Piggy Went to General Assembly…
by James A. Bacon With all the hungry piggies pushing for mo’ state money, the feeding trough is getting crowded. Besides the K-12 piggy (squealing for an extra $950 million), the Virginia Retirement System piggy (an extra $215.6 million), and the monstrous Medicaid piggy (the sky’s the limit — how much money do you have?),…
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A Budget Cut that Should be Made
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Just to show that I am not the “tax and spend” liberal that some people may think I am, I am proposing a significant budget cut for the Governor’s office to consider in its effort to satisfy all the demands it is getting for the upcoming biennial budget. That budget item can…
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The Game of Budgets
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There is lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on in this blog and by the administration over the upcoming budget. Although there are some big-ticket budget items, that is nothing new; there always are. Even if the Democrats gain a majority in both houses, I don’t think there will be…
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We Can’t Explain Virginia’s Declining Test Scores — Just Trust Us and Give Us Mo’ Money
by James A. Bacon The Richmond Times-Dispatch took a good hard look today at the alarming decline in reading scores by Virginia students in standardized tests, including both the state Standards of Learning (SOL) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). But reporter Justin Mattingly came up dry in explaining what might have caused…
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More SOQ Money
The other shoe has dropped on the budget requests for K-12. The Department of Education has told the Senate Finance Committee that it will cost approximately $300 million per year over the next biennium to “rebenchmark” the Standards of Quality. This amount would be in addition to the $950 million needed annually to finance the…
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SOQ Examination
by Dick Hall-Sizemore There has been a lot of commentary in recent posts over the state Board of Education’s proposed changes in the Standards of Quality, with a $950 million price tag. Rather than focusing on the total price tag and one component of the proposal (equity fund), it seems to me a more productive…
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Tax-and-Spend Pressure Builds Inexorably
by James A. Bacon There are two items in the news today indicating that pressure for more spending and taxes will be remorseless in the 2019 General Assembly session: (1) The Virginia Retirement System board of trustees has lowered the expected rate of return on its $82.3 billion investment portfolio, requiring $215.6 million-per-year additional contributions…
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JLARC: Medicaid Jumps 19% In Expansion Year
By Steve Haner Every year, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission issues a report looking at ten years of state spending, sliced and diced various ways. In recent years, the headline results have largely been surprisingly consistent and the 2019 report issued Monday fit the pattern. As seen before: Medicaid program costs lead the…
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Medicaid Expansion Cost Still Off-Budget, Elusive
By Steve Haner All the signs point to trouble. The next state budget, a two-year plan to be proposed in December, adopted by March and implemented in July, may be caught between stagnant revenue and soaring spending. The spending charge will be led once again by Medicaid. Just how much the decision to expand Medicaid…
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Virginia Ethics Enforcement So Weak It Can’t Be Rated
by Don Rippert Your General Assembly in Action (or inaction). The Coalition for Integrity (C4I) has rated the political ethics enforcement approaches of the 50 states. Virginia’s ethics enforcement is so weak that it is one of seven states that cannot be rated. This should not be surprising to anybody who regularly reads this blog.…
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Surplus? How About $455 Million Windfall Tax Hike
by Steve Haner Virginia ended the last fiscal year with about $797 million more in revenue than projected, and the Northam Administration credits $455 million of that to higher taxes on about 30% of taxpayers caused by conforming to the new federal tax law. More than 700,000 tax returns stopped claiming state itemized deductions, accounting…
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Slow and Steady Wins the Budget Race
by James A. Bacon Thanks in part to a $797 million surplus in last year’s budget, Virginia will build up its budget reserves to $1.6 billion by the end of the 2020 fiscal year, and Governor Ralph Northam is promising to take a “cautious and strategic” approach to the next biennial budget. “During the next…