Are lawmakers cooking a budget WV can stomach?
Gov. Jim Justice’s strategy for getting a 2017-18 budget bill passed seems to be coming into focus, using the framework of the pending agreement with Senate leaders that he prematurely announced in the last hours of the regular session back on April 8.
Senate leadership seems willing to accept Justice’s tax initiatives — which avoids major program cuts and puts people to work almost immediately on road construction projects — as long as it is portrayed under the guise of “tax reform.”
The Senate’s plan for tax reform may seem dubious in that it proposes tax relief for the wealthy, in the form of phasing out income taxes, while shifting that tax burden onto consumers — some of whom, it turns out, are not all that well off financially.
I gather what Justice is agreeing to is something of a tax reform-lite, requiring significant economic growth milestones to trigger the income tax rate rollbacks. (I also get the impression that would allow something less than a full 1 percent increase in sales taxes initially, as called for in the Senate plan.)
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