Charleston Gazette-Mail – “It’s kind of the perfect storm,” said Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “All of the spending and tax cuts are starting to hit the budget at the same time that those temporary revenue factors helped us make the case for the tax cuts have subsided.”
Read the full op-ed.
Gov. Patrick Morrissey has rightly declared that West Virginia is in fiscal trouble due to irresponsible, if popular, tax cuts and foreseeable revenue shortfalls. Expert observers place much of the blame on former governor, now Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va. And the same exact thing is happening right before our eyes on the federal level due to fiscal irresponsibility by the party once known, many decades ago, to be the party of balanced budgets.
We now have a president who does not believe that bankruptcy is bad. After all, Donald Trump’s own private enterprises have gone bankrupt six times. It is startling that any casino company can go belly up. But Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts Inc. repeatedly filed for bankruptcy whereby “shareholders lose much of their equity.” Trump personally did just fine, walking away as usual with his personal wealth intact, while blaming everyone else for his own failures.
