Washington Post - Fiscal notes, legislative analysis, cost estimates — call it what you want, but the official price tags attached to bills are a key part of legislating at every level of government. Read Many states have dedicated legislative analysts, and virtually every state has at least some way of estimating the fiscal impact…
WVCBP in the News
Charleston Daily Mail - Democrats and Republicans agree the process for estimating the cost of proposed legislation is often biased and unreliable, according to a survey by a West Virginia think tank. Read The West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, a liberal-leaning nonprofit, issued a report Tuesday calling for changes in the creation of…
Charleston Gazette - State tax collections continued to run about 3 percent below estimates in October, dragged down by personal income tax collections that fell $7.78 million below projections, deputy Revenue secretary Mark Muchow said Monday. Read "The biggest issue is a lack of significant growth in wages and salary income from this time a…
Charleston Gazette - With recent statistics pointing out that almost 30 percent of West Virginia's children under age 5 live below the poverty level, and 43,254 West Virginians under age 18 lived in poverty in 2008, it is baffling to consider that so much of the remedying of this atrocity is shouldered by organizations --…
Charleston Gazette - If an additional Kanawha County Schools excess levy is passed Nov. 9, the county will join 21 others around the state that already collect the maximum amount of property taxes legally allowed for education purposes. Read If passed, tax rates in Kanawha County -- the state's largest -- would be about 15…
Charleston Gazette - West Virginia's heavy dependence on blue-collar industries -- once a source of prosperity -- is a millstone around the state's neck as the new Information Age shifts to high-paying, knowledge-based employment in much of America. Too often, West Virginians are stuck with low-paying service jobs. Read That's the basic message of "From…
Charleston Gazette - Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., continued to express opposition to implementing a federal mandate requiring all Americans to get health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act -- even though advocates of the health-care law say removing the "individual mandate" would be catastrophic for health-care reform efforts. Read
West Virginia Public Broadcasting - Senator Joe Manchin is proposing a delay in a key component to the federal Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate. Manchin defended his legislation saying it allows the administration more time to fix glitches in the enrollment system, but a left-leaning policy group in Charleston maintains a delay will have…
Huntington Herald-Dispatch - The current minimum wage standard is not cutting it, according to a report issued this month by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. Read The report, titled "Giving West Virginia Workers a Raise: Increasing the State Minimum Wage," includes an analysis of wage statistics suggesting that the true value of…
West Virginia Public News Service and Hampshire Review - They work hard to get you a hot cup of coffee in the morning or a quick dinner at night, but many minimum wage fast-food workers depend on public assistance to feed their own families. Read According to research from the University of California at Berkeley,…