HooRah! Virginia has a current budget surplus of $3.6 billion. I’m all for giving all of it back to taxpayers, but if only 1/3 comes back, that’s good, too.
Given that there are 6.6 million adults in Virginia, my share would be a little under $200. Twice that with my wife’s share, or about 1/10 the price of the new sofa we’ve been eyeballing.
I should think the General Assembly can do us right over such a pittance.
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There is a bigger reason to return the surplus from fat years to the taxpayers. If we don’t, the legislature will find a way to grow government enough to spend it, and those expansions will not go away in lean years, when liberals will claim that because times are tough government must spend more.
It’s like a rachet wrench, government only pulls one way, The only remedy is to get the money out of their hands before they find ways to “invest” it in bigger government.
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RE: “The only remedy is to get the money out of their hands before they find ways to ‘invest’ it in bigger government.”
I worry about that, too. But I imagine someone could make the argument that government should grow for good causes.
I’m not so sure. I tend to think about the expense of government in terms of opportunity costs. That is, the value of a government-sponsored good is best measured by the value of private-sponsored goods that would have been provided had the money not been removed by taxation.
Another factor is that government-sponsored goods are not always productive. Examples are social insurance (Medicare, Social Security, UBI) and defense spending. In that case, the value of the government-sponsored good is inherently zero, making the comparable opportunity cost actually subtractive.
The moral, I suppose, is that no good deed can go “unpunished,” even when we want it to.
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Completely agree. I dont have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have seen government find ways to spend surpluses that obligated future funding while the population shouted give it back.
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Didn’t you get a check form the state last year? We did. I don’t recall the amount, but it was in the $600 range for a married couple.
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Yes we did but that is the only time in over 40 years of paying taxes.
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How much of that surplus is due to the federal monies that Washington sends to Virginia.
VA receives one of the lowest amounts of federal aid, about 21% of state revenues, but is one of the largest recipients of defense spending.
One would think that if we had a nice surplus, it was due in no small part to American taxpayers from all states and territories.
So a couple of billion back to the treasury would be nice.
Of course that won’t happen.
Here is a thought, how about revisiting negotiation to get the Portsmouth tunnels away from the predatory deal McDonald stuck us with. The tunnels serve a major port, shipyards for commerce and defense, national and state benefits. And local residents had to pay for all of it.
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What does that have to do with the ‘rachet’ effect on State spending?
In good times, instead of returning the excess to the taxpayers, the GA finds new programs, or existing programs to expand, to spend the surplus.
But then in slow times, they won’t reduce those programs, they demand more taxes to keep them going.
Every cycle the spending either stays the same or increases, and more money is taken from the private sector, making us more dependent on Federal spending.
Which is, of course, doing the same damn thing.
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“What does that have to do with the ‘ratchet’ effect on State spending?”
If we buy out the tunnel, that ends that turn of the ratchet.
If we return some to the feds, that ends VA ratcheting with that money.
Isn’t that what you complained about?
There is a lot of waste, no doubt. Neither party is faultless, although conservatives make more noise when out of power.
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And when they have the power, they spend like drunken Democrats. 😇
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Here’s a $201 million dollar chop off the top of the surplus.
https://www.pilotonline.com/government/virginia/vp-nw-school-funding-error-20230131-lrqtqcp5c5ayxehsuq4ylejzwy-story.html
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You put a Trump supporter in office and expect competence?
It is telling that even when the error was discovered it wasn’t immediately corrected out of that surplus. What were they hoping for? That nobody would notice?
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More likely they were hoping that all of the talk of “fixing education” would preclude them from actually fixing education.
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