By: The Commonwealth Institute
Virginia needs to add 12,000 jobs per month, every month, for the next two years just to return to pre-recession employment levels. That sobering statistic is among the numbers released this week in a new and dramatic unemployment forecast from The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis.
By: Liz Burroughs
Richmond, VA – The Virginia Main Street Alliance has released a new report highlighting impacts of the financial crisis on small businesses and Main Street business owners’ views on financial reform. Main Street Policy Pulse: Small Business Views on Financial Reform is based on a survey of more than 1,200 small business owners from 14 states. The report finds strong support among Main Street small businesses for strong financial reforms, including the creation of a consumer financial protection agency.
By: Neil Bergsman, Michael Cassidy a Elissa Silverman
We just celebrated New Year’s, but for legislators in Annapolis, Richmond and the District, it probably seems like Groundhog Day, with budget shortfalls (again), falling revenue (again) and high unemployment (again).
By: Patrick Getlein
A little noticed bill this session is garnering the attention — and support — of the faith community. Patroned by Sen. Chap Petersen the bill would extend consumer protections to churches and other congregations and help protect them from consumer fraud.
By Lauren Mooney, Housing Policy Fellow
Not In My Back Yard: HB 1280 Will Help Remove Barriers to Affordable Housing Development.
Have you ever volunteered with Habitat for Humanity? Or Better Housing Coalition? Across the U.S. and in the Commonwealth, organizations like these are crucial to developing affordable housing for our seniors, police officers, teachers, and low-income neighbors.
Read more…
HB 1122, we wrote about previously, removes a job preserving measure from a corporate tax giveaway. This bill passed unanimously out of Subcommittee #2 of the House Finance Committee.
By: Patrick Getlein
Report Shows Many Obscure, Unreported Tax Provisions cost Virginia over $2.5 Billion; Greater Oversight Needed
A host of mostly unknown and unreported tax expenditure programs are draining the state’s revenue by more than $2.5 billion each year, according to analysis by The Commonwealth Institute. Yet despite their large costs, Virginia does not regularly evaluate or report on them.
By: Joe Stanley
Sign our statement and hold the ground on the Stewardship of Creation.
Tuesday at our Day for All People of Faith lobby event, I received an urgent text message from a fellow advocate on environmental issues: Sen. Jim Webb was considering whether to cosponsor the Murkowski amendment to a funding bill for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The amendment would strip a great deal of the EPA’s authority to regulate anything related to carbon dioxide. This removal of authority would have had unintended and toxic consequences, such as disallowing them from applying Clean Drinking Water regulations to coal carbon sequestration projects.
HB103 will disallow small property owners to discriminate in ways that are illegal for larger property owners.
When Virginia passed its state Fair Housing Law in 1972, they made a political compromise to exempt small landlords and property owners from being held accountable for discrimination. Nearly 40 years have passed since these laws were enacted, and it’s time for change.
By Rev. C. Douglas Smith
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, poverty is most apparent in areas like southwest, southside and the Eastern Shore. Recent estimates from the U.S. Census suggest that poverty rates are a staggering 14.9% in rural Virginia while cresting to 9.1% in non-rural areas. With these mammoth rural communities and the legislators they send to Richmond, one would reasonably expect that poverty-related legislation would be constitute more than the handful of bills filed so far. (Richmond Sunlight search tag: poverty)
Del. Kathy Byron has a bill to remove a job-preserving provision from a corporate tax giveaway last year. This removes the last fig leaf left covering the single sales factor apportionment. It has now been laid bare for all to see that it was not about job creation at all, but just a blatant corporate giveaway.
Well the only excuse for such a blatant corporate giveaway last year, was that it would “create jobs” and wording was included in the legislation, where if the corporation using the single sales factor apportionment laid off employees after using this tax break, then they’d have to pay those taxes as a penalty. Now Del. Byron wants to get rid of this job-preserving provision.
Unfortunately, we have been cutting services to low and moderate income Virginians while giving away lavish tax breaks to Virginia’s biggest, richest corporations. Last year, at the 2009 legislative session, the Virginia General Assembly, during a very tough budget year, gave away $55 million a year of tax money to some of Virginia’s biggest, richest corporations through the Single Sales Factor apportionment (HB 2437).
This corporate tax-giveaway has absolutely no research showing that it creates jobs. Of the three states that had net gains in manufacturing jobs between December 2001 and December 2007, not one was a single sales factor state.
Virginia’s low and moderate income residents should be prioritized before Virginia’s biggest, richest corporations.
By: Lauren Mooney, Housing Policy Fellow
“A group of kids basically woke me up with an aluminum bat, beat me all over, cracked one of my teeth and, you know, called me names, and I’m pretty sure they broke a rib.”
~David Pirtle, formerly homeless man in Washington, DC
Legislation submitted by Del. Patrick Hope (D-Arlington) proposes adding another protection to hate crime legislation – status as a homeless person. This kind of legislation is gaining momentum across the country as attacks against people living on the streets have gained attention, partially due to the production of Bumfights videos and the ubiquity of YouTube. The first Bumfights videos were produced as early as 2001, but legislation to add homeless status to hate crime legislation has been slow to catch up.
By: LaTonya Reed
Car title lending hits the mean streets of the GA!
Car title lending will be a hot topic during the 2010 General Assembly session. Already, nine bills are on the scene and lawmakers still have time to file new legislation. Three of the proposed measures are squarely in line with the Virginia Interfaith Center’s push for reasonable limitations on the annual interest rates allowed for car title loans. Senate Bill 20 (Locke) would cap annual interest rates at 36 percent, regardless of loan amount. And House Bill 187 (Morrisey) would do the same, but also require lenders to be licensed. Senate Bill 167 (Edwards), like the Consumer Finance Act, contains a 36 percent cap for loans of $2,500 or less.
An Analysis of Governor Kaine’s Outgoing 2010-2012 Biennium Budget
Governor Tim Kaine’s final budget proposal reflects the problems facing Virginia in the current economy: As the needs of Virginians have grown during the recession, the state has fewer resources to address these needs.
Continued job losses have meant lost wages and health care for many Virginians. Education needs have grown as more children enroll in public schools and workers go back to school for re-training. Yet, the resources needed to pay for these public services have been declining as the recession has brought declining revenues from income, sales, and corporate taxes.
By: Joe Stanley
The fall elections have changed the legislative nose count.
The 2010 General Assembly session has just barely begun as this newsletter hits your inbox or mailbox, and already people are saying that this year’s session will be very different from years past. That’s a fine throwaway line. But there is some truth to it. What exactly makes it different? The short answer to that is … well … a lot of things. Let’s start with the fall elections.
By Rev. C. Douglas Smith
My friend Jim Wallis at the Sojourners Community speaks of budgets being “moral documents,” investing in the values and priorities of civil society. While I agree that the state budget may reflect the priorities of the legislature, budget bills are already being filed that are far from the values of a broader civil society. Amid dangerous budget cuts that Michael Cassidy of The Commonwealth Institute says are “no longer about fat but are cutting deep into the bone,” some legislators are pressing forward with an agenda that would shift $600 million in tax liabilities from big corporations to individuals (HB119). As if the last two years of economic meltdown were not enough, now some of our elected leaders plan to hand out millions of dollars in corporate welfare to the further detriment of social services, public safety, and public education.
