Category: Government Finance
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Holding the Line in Henrico
by James A. Bacon Sidney Gunst has never been reluctant to express his ardent views on the failings of government and has never been shy about chastising public officials, even to their face. But the former real estate developer has never felt as determined as he is today to challenge the status quo. The latest…
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Calvinists, Libertines and the Medicaid Debate
by James A. Bacon So, we learn from Peter G. in the previous post that conservatives who oppose the willy-nilly expansion of Medicaid in Virginia are either preppies who dress like they just walked off the plantation after giving the darkies a good hard whipping or are hard-right cheapskates with a Calvinist bent. This is…
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Moody’s Gives Thumbs Up to Guv’s Transportation Package
I’m always preaching the need to bolster the creditworthiness of the commonwealth — and with the fiscal calamities I see coming out of Washington, D.C., Virginia’s AAA rating just isn’t strong enough — so I feel obliged to take note of a statement issued by Moody’s Investor Services last week. The bond-rating agency has found…
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Haven’t We Seen this Show Before?
Item One, from WSJ article, “Bernanke Affirms Bond Buying” (my emphasis): “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came down firmly in favor of continuing the central bank’s bond-buying programs, even as he acknowledged concerns that the efforts might encourage risk-taking that could someday destabilize markets or the economy.” Item Two, from WSJ article, “Builders Fuel Home…
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Fragility, Antifragility and Virginia
by James A. Bacon Nassim Nicholas Taleb invoked the phrase “black swan” in a book by the same name to describe rare, hard-to-predict and highly disruptive events. The near-collapse of the U.S. banking system, which had been unforeseen by banks, regulators, politicians, economists and almost everyone (save a handful, like Taleb himself), is a classic…
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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children. Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly…
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Land Use and Tax Revenue in Fairfax County
by James A. Bacon Last year I published research documenting the vast discrepancy in property tax revenue per acre between commercial development in low-density versus high-density settings in Sarasota, Fla. A mid-rise tower with retail on the ground floor and condominiums above could yield literally 100 times the property tax revenue per acre as a…
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“Jeopardy” for Budding World Statesmen
By Peter Galuszka At Richmond’s Hotel Jefferson, 10 teams of earnest-looking high school students, some in shirt sleeves, pore over notepads as they consider the questions put to them on a big screen, Jeopardy-style, in the Grand Ballroom. “What percentage of oil used by the United States actually comes from these Persian Gulf countries?” Other…
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Is Virginia Uranium Quickly Running Out of Money?
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in Agriculture & forestry, Business and Economy, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Science & TechnologyBy Peter Galuszka Just how financially viable is Virginia Uranium, which appears to be losing its battle to lift a 31-year-old ban on uranium mining in Virginia? Corporate documents filed with Canadian securities regulators state that as of last September, Virginia Energy Resources Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia-based parent of Virginia Uranium that wants to mine…
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Documenting the Federal Distortion of Real Estate Markets
by James A. Bacon Between zoning codes, parking regulations, development fees, tax abatements, transportation and infrastructure spending, caps on building permits and other local government intrusions into real estate markets, the surprisingly widespread notion that dysfunctional human settlement patterns can be blamed on unchecked capitalism has always been a ludicrous one. Now Smart Growth America…
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The Virginia GOP’s Destructive Palace Coups
By Peter Galuszka Just how out of control are Virginia’s Republicans? This week’s redistricting coup attempt staged by prominent Republicans John Watkins and his cohort Thomas K. Norment in the otherwise evenly divided state Senate is as cynical as it is destructive. On Monday, the pair took advantage of the absence of a key Democratic…
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The Wobbly World of Global Uranium Prices
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in Business and Economy, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka Highly controversial plans to mine and mill a rich tract of uranium in Pittsylvania County are before the General Assembly. Plenty of studies, lobbyists and scads of money are being thrown about on both sides of the argument. Yet a brief story on page B7 in today’s Wall Street Journal deals with…
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Transportation Funding Car Wreck
Uh, oh, the anti-tax wing of the Republican Party was already getting cold feet about Governor Bob McDonnell’s transportation funding plan yesterday. As Capital News Service quoted, Del. Ben Cline, R-Amherst, as saying in a press conference held by the General Assembly’s Conservative Caucus: “Conservatives want to see taxes kept low. They want to see…
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The Dumb and Dumber Transportation Funding Policy
by Randy Salzman If Virginia removes its meager gasoline tax, the state, economic history shows, will have more people driving more places more frequently, which will increase congestion, add to the nation’s oil import tab and force the United States to keep expensive military forces near foreign oil fields. It will accelerate the oil world’s…
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Utt Says What’s What on Transportation Plan
Ron Utt, recently retired transportation scholar with the Heritage Foundation, has elucidated his concerns about Governor Bob McDonnell’s transportation plan. In an op-ed published in the Bearing Drift blog, he makes some salient points: There is much that is wrong with this plan; chief among them is the end of the fuel tax – which…