Budget

Big Wins In K-12 Public Policy, But What’s Next? There is little doubt that West Virginia’s public policy problems are legion. They have built up over the last several decades. First and foremost among said problems was a lack of options in the state’s calcified K-12 education system. With… Read More

Why Are Taxes So Hard? As tax season winds down and you’re deep in your last-minute filing, you’ve probably caught yourself thinking, “why are taxes so stinkin’ hard?!”   No doubt, I’ve sat in front of my computer on late nights trying to figure this all out. More than once,… Read More

On March 11th, President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion relief plan. Known as the American Rescue Plan, this Act intended to help the American economy recover from the year-long coronavirus pandemic. The most discussed parts of the program are the individual stimulus checks and expansion of the… Read More

Wasteful Spending: A Trade Secret   In 2017, an investigation was launched into the West Virginia Supreme Court for overzealous spending. 2009 sparked a renovation initiative for the Court with a price tag of roughly $876,000. But, by 2017, the expenses ballooned to $3.7 billion. Most notable o… Read More

Education Costs & the Hope Scholarship   Amid all the talk about why lawmakers in West Virginia should or shouldn’t pass legislation that introduces Hope Scholarship education savings accounts to students and families across the Mountain State, one major point of contention always comes bac… Read More

State legislators are considering the elimination of the personal income tax in the upcoming Spring session. These discussions have sparked a conversation about taxation and why it is essential to a government’s functioning.   Opponents to abolishing the income tax claim that West Virgini… Read More

Some things in life simply require a second serving. Ice cream, Netflix episodes, and French fries all aren’t the same without just a little bit more. Unfortunately, our gluttonous state government has gone in for seconds- on an expensive and complex technology contract. As reported by Metro News, G… Read More

Teachers, parents, students, and everyone in between are gearing up for some kind of start to the 2020-21 school year. There’s no denying that uncertainty is the prevailing theme this school year.   Will the year start in person or virtually? Can the spread of the coronavirus be contained? What… Read More

Many of our individual lives have changed in some way or another due to the coronavirus. Similarly, lawmakers have a wide range of public policy options worthy of consideration as they are tasked with facilitating smooth transitions into post-coronavirus life and recovery of the localities and econo… Read More

In these Halloween Haunts, we share some frightening government waste of  taxpayer money that is truly scarier than any horror film!    The Untrackable $200 million Asset   State lawmakers finally created a centralized state vehicle inventory system in 2018 to help track as many as 12,000 gover… Read More