Tag: Stephen D. Haner
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If No Better Ideas Emerge, Go With These
By Steve Haner First published Tuesday by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. In 1972, a Virginia taxpayer needed a taxable income of $12,000 before the state’s maximum income tax rate kicked in. Adjusted for inflation, that threshold should be $78,000 today. There has been one adjustment since, to $17,000 in income before the…
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Election Law Changes: Sept. 17 is Now Key Date
by Steve Haner If the current COVID-19 surge continues into the fall, and Governor Ralph Northam once again declares a health emergency, absentee ballots returned by mail will not need a witness signature. Now it will be by General Assembly fiat, not a judge’s order. That alone ought to motivate a bunch of hesitant Republicans…
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Virginia Next-to-Last in Motley Fool Ranking
by Steve Haner If you need another reason to break into peals of laughter over the recent CNBC “Top States for Business” ranking, consider this. In the story about the infrastructure rankings, while praising the state of Nevada, the illustration provided was the aerial shot of the Tonopah Solar Energy facility. The failed, now-in-bankruptcy (also…
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Freedom From Union Dues Hangs on Warner
By Vincent Vernuccio First published by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. A bill under active consideration in Congress would allow unions to get Virginia workers fired for not paying union fees. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, among many other things would end right-to-work laws in Virginia and in 26 other states.…
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Digging Beyond the #1 Ranking
by Steve Haner Virginia ranks #1 in the “Top States for Business 2021” ranking produced by the business network CNBC, but it is important to dig into the ten measurement categories. They are not weighted evenly. Changing the former “Quality of Life” measure to “Life, Health and Inclusion,” and adding more points to that category, sealed the…
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Time to Cut Taxes
by Stephen D. Haner If Virginia ended the fiscal year June 30 with a general fund cash surplus of $2 billion, almost 10 percent of its annual budget, that means taxes are too high. Period. The debate for the 2021 political season should be how to cut taxes, and how much. The $2 billion projection…
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With Defeat in Connecticut, Will Virginia Drop TCI?
By Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Why do Virginia’s leaders run away from the Transportation and Climate Initiative? Could it be because the first state legislature to consider it, in reliably Democratic Connecticut, just adjourned without even taking a vote on the proposed carbon tax compact, despite…
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State Revenue Up a Full Third in Northam Years
by Steve Haner With one month to go in its fiscal year, Virginia has almost met its General Fund revenue target in the first eleven months, as the revenue bonanza described here before continues. Partly it is due to the strong economic recovery post-COVID, but it is also due to numerous increased tax rates or…
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Businesses Taxed For Somebody Else’s Layoffs?
by Steve Haner So many Virginia employers faltered or failed during 2020, the remaining companies may be charged a special tax of $95 on each of their own employees in 2022. It will cover the unemployment benefits paid to workers somebody else laid off, the highest so called “pool tax” ever imposed, more than double…
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VA Employers Stuck in COVID Time Warp
By Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Despite the stunning and rapid success of the vaccines in arresting the spread of COVID-19, if you enter a Virginia workplace you go back in time to the pre-vaccine era of doubt and fear. Virginia acted in haste in adopting…
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Clean Virginia Dissed Again, Dem Takes Dom Cash
by Steve Haner Prince William Democrat Hala Ayala, who had pledged not to accept campaign contributions from Dominion Energy Virginia and took money instead from its opponents, has now accepted $100,000 from the regulated monopoly. Heads are exploding. The anti-Dominion activist group Clean Virginia had given her $25,000 in her bid for the Democratic nomination…
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Democrats Fight Back as Boss Bills Cracks Whip
by Steve Haner Two Virginia Democrats who have been loyal soldiers in the army to turn Virginia green as well as blue are under attack in the June 8 primary for the sin of accepting campaign donations from Dominion Energy. It doesn’t matter to the attacker – our old friend Clean Virginia — that Dominion…
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Protect Taxpaying Virginians From Coming Inflation
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. One of big financial winners with the May 1 Virginia minimum wage increase is the state itself, because the entire raise is subject to a 5% state income tax. With its low standard deduction and personal exemption amounts, Virginia squeezes…
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Tech Prof Corrected WHO, CDC on COVID Spread
by Steve Haner Wired has chronicled a one-year struggle by a Virginia Tech teacher and researcher, working mainly with other non-physicians, to convince the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization they were dead wrong on COVID. The kind of dead wrong that made more people dead. The battle was quietly won when on…
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State Tax Harvest Under Northam Expands Again
by Steve Haner With the release today of the April 2021 Virginia state revenue report, a correction in an earlier post becomes necessary. Overall general fund state tax collections are not up 26% so far compared to four years ago, they are up almost 30 percent. Corporate income tax collections are not up 68%, but…