Virginia consistently ranks as one of the most business-friendly states in America, although lately we have been slipping. According to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, since 2001, manufacturing companies have invested $14.5 billion and created more than 72,000 new jobs in Virginia and nearly $4 billion in capital investment. That...
Food deserts are back in the news here in Richmond with the premier of a documentary, “Living in a Food Desert,” at the Richmond International Film Festival. First Lady Dorothy McAuliffe, who has made food security her signature cause, attended the screening and addressed the audience. More than 300,000 Virginia children...
Most discussions of the pros and cons of P3 concessions cite as benefits the availability of investment from new sources (e.g., pension funds and developer equity), shifting various risks (such as construction cost overruns) from taxpayers to investors, and ensuring proper maintenance over the life of the project, thanks to...
Soring of horses is a terrible practice! Soring is the use of chemicals to cause pain in a horse’s feet when they touch the ground, resulting in the horse picking its feet up quickly. Even so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on February 19, 2015, in Contender Farms...
After years of claiming the science is settled and unprecedented manmade catastrophes are occurring right now, Climate Crisis, Inc. is increasingly desperate. Polls put climate change at the bottom of every list of public concerns. China and India refuse to cut energy production or emissions. Real-world weather and climate totally...
Virginia gained only 12,900 jobs in 2014, or a 0.3 percent increase from the previous year. That increase was the worst year-over-year performance the state has had since 2010, when it shrunk by 4,800 jobs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The meager employment growth in Virginia last year...
We continually hear about an “infrastructure crisis” in the United States, a malady from which Virginia has not been spared. Talk of pot-holed streets, tottering bridges and crumbling highways invariably moves to talk about the need to spend more on infrastructure, which morphs into raising taxes — never by talk about paring...
(Editor’s note: This article from Watchdog.org’s Virginia Bureau on February 17th is reprinted because the idea that legislation needs to be passed to make sure the transportation funding’s top priority is congestion relief speaks volumes about what is wrong with government. This article highlights this legislation pending in the General...
In late January six environmental groups filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia claiming that EPA violated their rights by not responding to a 2011 petition to regulate ammonia as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The environmentalists request that EPA be found in violation...
They say politics makes strange bedfellows. In a perfect example, U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) are cosponsoring the “Corn Ethanol Mandate Elimination Act,” to abolish the corn ethanol Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that increasing volumes of this biofuel be blended into gasoline. Let’s hope...
