Sorry for not posting over the last two weeks, but I've been out of the country. I am just now catching up on the news. Howard Swint had a thought provoking op-ed in the Gazette this past Friday advocating for a 40% profits tax on coal to replace the coal severance tax. As many may…
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Back in December, the Governor issued an executive order to cut $120 million from the FY10 budget . He did this, according to our report, based on an overly pessimistic review of the November 2009 tax revenue collections. When collections rose in December, the Governor said "we must stay the course." We said then…
With the national unemployment rate kissing 10% , it was disheartening to see Howard Swint join the job killing deficit hawks. In Saturday's Gazette-Mail, Swint argues that the solution to our economic woes is a federal "Balanced Budget Amendment" that "provides that annual expenditures do not exceed revenue for any fiscal year." Swint worries that…
As I mentioned in my last post , the Census projects that by 2030 one in four West Virginians will be over age 65. As a result, it could cost state and local governments a lot revenue. This is because seniors, in general, are not part of the labor force. This means they pay less in…
Would you consider it a "crisis" if an accountant told you how much money you owe on your house? Apparently, that's the rationale Phil Kabler used yesterday when he told people that our state's $8 billion OPEB (Other Post Employment Benefits = the state's retiree health care subsidy for state and public school employees) liability is "the…
BLS released regional and state unemployment figures today. West Virginia ranks in the middle of the pack, with the 23rd highest unemployment rate at 9.2%. As Paul showed in his previous post, the "real" unemployment rate is probably closer to 13%. Since the national recession began in December 07, the unemployment rate has increased by…
Earlier this week Workforce West Virginia revealed that our state's unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) for April was down slightly, from 9.5 percent to 9.2 percent, with about 72,000 "unemployed" workers. However, these figures do not reveal the number of workers who've dropped out of the labor force either because they've can't find work, have gone…
This picture in yesterday's Charleston Daily Mail got me thinking about how many workers in West Virginia wear a hard hat with a lamp each day. While the best estimates (see here and here and here, and here ) say about 20,000 people work directly in the state's "coal industry," most of these workers are…