The Senate Finance Committee has amended the GOP tax bill, making significant changes to the bill, including the repeal of the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act. The legislation is described as tax reform but would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in health care spending. The provision recently added to the legislation to repeal…
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The U.S. Senate has released their version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While the bill has some differences from the version released by the House, its overall affect is largely the same, with the benefits heavily favoring the wealthy. The Senate's tax bill would raise taxes on some families while giving large tax cuts…
The House of Representatives has formally introduced its tax reform bill, The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The bill, like the tax reform framework it is based on, heavily favors the wealthy. The bill includes some provisions that raise taxes and some that cut taxes, so the net effect for any particular family's federal tax bill depends…
The tax framework released last week by President Trump and Republican congressional leaders would result in huge tax cuts for the wealthiest households, while offering little to middle- and lower-income families. In West Virginia, the richest one percent of residents would receive 39.1 percent of the tax cuts within the state under the framework in 2018, according to…
The Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University released their annual Economic Outlook Report for the state earlier this month. According to the report’s forecast, West Virginia is expected to experience modest job growth, with employment forecasted to grow at an average rate of 0.7 percent per year for the next five years. That’s…
The Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University released their annual Economic Outlook Report for the state earlier this month. According to the report's forecast, West Virginia is expected to experience modest job growth, with employment forecasted to grow at an average rate of 0.7 percent per year for the next five…
The latest attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Cassidy-Graham bill, would cut West Virginia's funding for Medicaid by $2.0 billion by 2027. This would undermine health coverage for tens of thousands of West Virginian's and threaten the state's historic gains in health coverage stemming from the Affordable Care Act. The Cassidy-Graham bill cuts…
While it is unclear what version of the legislation the U.S. Senate will plan to take up on Tuesday (7/25) when they vote to proceed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the revised version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) would be particularly harmful to West Virginians. An updated report from the…
SNAP plays a crucial role helping workers in low-paying jobs afford a basic diet in West Virginia. Each year between 2013 and 2015, an average of 81,000 West Virginia workers lived in households that participated in SNAP within the last year, according to analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For many of…
When lawmakers passed a "bare-bones" state budget, some lawmakers expressed that the state government needs to "live within its means" because of our "shrinking population and tax base." Other lawmakers have suggested that our state budget is too big and that we will need to "continue making cuts to programs and services" and that we should…