The building season is here, but for developers of Virginia’s two hotly-contested natural gas pipelines, activity is back in the government agencies and courthouses. The construction sites remain largely silent, delays running up the ultimate cost of the projects, including the cost of failure. Here is my (probably flawed) attempt...
Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and a team of other scientists issued a study on April 1, 2019, which initially I thought was an April Fool’s joke. It is no joke!According to one publication and its author, Prachi Patel, wrote on April 4, 2019 “…corn is...
Talk of recession has picked up again. The reason might sound complicated, but the principle is fairly basic. In financial parlance, we’re talking about the inversion of the yield curve. Here’s what that means … and how it might take a bit of time to know the consequences.The U.S. Treasury...
Government is much better at creating poverty than at curing it. On April 3 the General Assembly voted to end the practice of suspending driving licenses for non-payment of fines or restitution or both and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles to restore driving privileges for hundreds of thousands of Virginians....
Last year, the Richmond City Council considered an 80 cent per pack increase in the cigarette tax. After several public hearings and careful consideration of the shortcomings of this proposal, the City Council voted it down. But like Jason in the series of Halloween movies, “he’s back!” This time the...
Farm Foundation, which studies agricultural issues in a neutral manner and does not lobby, issued a report last October which is disturbing for agriculture. This report, How U.S. Agriculture Will Fare Under the USMCA and Retaliatory Tariffs, included experts from Purdue University and the Global Trade Analysis Project. This study agrees the United...
The two largest problems facing America’s highway system are (1) the need to reconstruct and modernize the aging Interstate highway system and (2) the need to start replacing per-gallon fuel taxes with per-mile charges. In the January issue of Surface Transportation Newsletter, I suggested that the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Future Interstate Study Committee...
A new study, The Impact of Cigarette Tax Increases on Local Government Budgets, concludes that such tax increases hurt low income users and small business sellers the most. The study also demonstrates that tax hikes rarely meet the projections of local government agencies.
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The Taxpayer Relief Fund to be created with the residual dollars from the 2019 state tax legislation on conformity has not seen the first dollar deposited and Governor Ralph Northam is already proposing to spend some of it, seeking to expand to 150,000 more Virginians the refund payments given in...
Conservatives have always been skeptical about building massive government-run preschool programs. They frequently cite the cost, or the fact that some studies show the effects of pre-k programs fade or disappear over time. Liberals, meanwhile, are customarily critical of anything that smacks of “school choice,” usually arguing that the answer...
