Taxes: a Love Story

Campus Report ^ | October 19, 2009 | Brittany Fortier

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Taxes: A Love Story

Brittany Fortier, October 19, 2009

What impact do taxes have on the budgetary process? A conference hosted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) on September 30, 2009 featured panelists who discussed this question and other issues regarding the national debt.

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) discussed how some of the budget reforms he made while he was Governor of Virginia could be a “model for how we take on this issue at the national level.”

Warner claimed that his “predecessor had set” a budget shortfall of $3.8 billion, which eventually “grew” to $6 billion. Jim Gilmore, Warner’s opponent in last November’s Virginia Senate race, was quoted in the Virginian-Pilot on October 4, 2008 as saying that “there was never a budget shortfall.” Warner was nevertheless convinced of Virginia’s alleged economic crisis and required his opponents to choose sides. He told the CAP audience that, at the end of the day, it was about “who was for Virginia and who wasn’t.”

“We acknowledged we had a crisis. We acknowledged that we had a structural deficit,” he said. “We pounded ‘structural deficit, structural deficit’ into a press corps that had never heard the term before.”

Then, Warner’s administration proceeded to make “massive budget cuts,” which were made “much to the chagrin” of Warner’s Democratic allies. The cut that Warner said really “drove the point home” was shutting down the already overburdened Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) for one day a week.

“[This] resulted in the greatest outrage around....

[freespirited]

I have never understood why Mark Warner is so popular in Virginia.