A new Education Improvement Scholarships Tax Credit law allows individual and corporate donors to take a 65 percent state tax credit on their charitable donation to qualified scholarship foundations — on top of the current state and federal tax deduction. Those scholarship foundations, in turn, provide scholarships for the children...
Something unusual happened in the Virginia General Assembly the other week: A bipartisan vote on a controversial issue.Governor Bob McDonnell’s Opportunity Educational Institution legislation crafts a system for taking over consistently failing public schools. McDonnell’s legislation essentially creates a new school division, transferring unaccredited schools from their local school system...
A little-noticed vote in Richmond last week shows the difficulty of keeping government within reasonable bounds when a significant private-sector player, allied with officialdom, seems to prefer the status quo. A bill to make life easier for farmers with small commercial sidelines lost by a wide margin in the Senate...
Though only out of office for a month, it is already clear that one of the most important and potentially lasting legacies of the administration of former Puerto Rico Governor Luis Fortuño will be its work turning the territory into a privatization leader among its state peers. To address Puerto...
Smart traffic lights are no cure-all for Virginia’s congested road network but VDOT increasingly regards them as part of the solution. Northern Virginia traffic was quieter than usual in the early morning of January 17. The weather forecast was calling for snow later in the day, and the Federal Office...
Companies everywhere extol their sustainable development programs and goals. Sustainability drives UN programs like Agenda 21, EU and US green energy initiatives, and myriad manufacturing, agricultural, forestry and other efforts. But what is sustainability? What is – or isn’t – sustainable? Obama presidential science advisor John Holdren has said we...
Virginians care about the health of their rivers and streams. The Commonwealth has long been an active partner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in implementing the Clean Water Act. Lately, however, the state roles and the federal roles have become confused and nowhere is this a bigger problem than...
An anti-poverty commission appointed by Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones has produced a schizophrenic report recommending how to address poverty in the city. On the one hand, it proffers some common-sense proposals on how to help poor Richmonders find jobs and otherwise improve their condition. On the other, it advocates...
(This article is reprinted from Surface Transportation Innovations, a publication of the Reason Foundation.)Last fall when I began focusing on the impending Jan. 2nd federal sequester (now postponed two months), I concluded that engaging in endless battles over dividing up shrinking federal transportation money is counterproductive. As Congress grapples with...
(This column ran in the Richmond Times Dispatch on February 4, 2013.) Home affordability in the Richmond region stood at its highest level in the third quarter of last year since 2003. The region had 51.9 percent of households that could afford to buy a median-priced home — with half...
