The Jefferson Journal
Commentary
Sometimes you have to start the victory lap, even if you only get halfway around the track. A year ago, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy was beating the drum for a proposal to double the state’s standard deduction, the amount of family income exempt from income tax. It...
Virginia taxpayers will save almost $600 million over two years as a result of the increase in the state standard deduction, a step proposed last year by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. That is a fresh estimate released November 21 as the Senate Finance Committee heard an after-action...
It doesn’t make sense to ban jobs that pay a living wage, just because an employer can’t afford to pay a still higher wage. But that is what a $15 minimum wage does in regions where living costs and wages are low. There are cheap regions to live in where...
As of today, using toll finance to rebuild part or all of a state’s Interstate highways is under discussion in 14 states that I know of. In some states, these discussions are bipartisan, but in other states, some conservative legislators have become outspoken opponents of tolling. Current examples include Connecticut...
A 72-year-old judge, Christina A. Snyder, appointed by President Clinton in 1997, handed the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) , U.S. agriculture,l and the Constitution of the United States a stunning legal defeat at a November 18, 2019 court hearing in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California...
Will Virginia’s new Democratic majority in the General Assembly help kill the Electoral College? Millions who slept through government class were stunned to learn in 2016 that the popular vote doesn’t pick a president. It had also happened in 2000, with a similar pattern of disappointed Democrats complaining the Electoral...
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) stated, “People in Washington and Silicon Valley are overlooking the threat of Chinese agricultural technology theft because they think that food grows in a grocery store.” In a Washington, D.C, newspaper article, Cotton claimed only President Trump is attempting to stop China from stealing intellectual property....
The kickoff to the holiday selling season starts this month. It is an important time of year for retailers as holiday sales represent about 20% of the retail industry’s total sales. Despite businesses having uncertainty over tariffs and seeing somewhat slower economic growth, consumer spending continues to expand at a...
With the opening of Virginia’s I-395 Express Lanes now open up to the Potomac River, its worth asking: “How many express toll lane projects are in operation in the United States today?” As of mid-summer, according to a tally provided by the International Bridge, Tunnel & Turnpike Association’s TollMiner database,...
“Demography is Destiny.” It was a phrase first popularized in the 1970 bestselling book The Real Majority by Democrats Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg in which they argued that the Democratic Party was veering leftward (particularly on social issues and “law and order”) and that, to win, the Party had...