The Obamacare scapegoat strikes again! It seems that some businesses have found it useful to blame the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, to make unpopular announcements. Unfortunately, the most recent attempt to deflect the blame using Obamacare hits my family directly as our daughter's daycare, the West Virginia Public Employees' Daycare, announced yesterday it would…
Blog
The West Virginia House of Delegates passed legislation that would increase the state's minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $8.75 by 2016. We've already looked at the demographics of who would be affected by the increase, now we'll look at how much it would cost. Using the same method as when we looked the cost of…
As noted yesterday by the Daily Mail and Gazette, the House of Delegates overwhelming passed a bill (HB 4283) to increase the state's minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $8.75 by 2016. As Dave Boucher carefully notes, the bill also increases the minimum wage for tipped workers from $2.13 to $2.63 by 2016. As I…
Bills introduced in both the Senate and the House this session propose to raise the tobacco tax in West Virginia by $1 per pack of cigarettes. While it is a big increase from the 55 cents per pack today, it would actually only catch West Virginia up to the national average ($1.53 per pack) while…
Legislation to increase the state minimum to will be up for a vote today in the House of Delegates. The bill, which originally gradually raised the minimum wage to $8.50, will now raise it to $8.75. Previously, we showed that an increase to $8.50 would give a raise to approximately 113,000 West Virginian workers. Now,…
Last week, we took a look at the total cost of the state's tax cuts of the past few years. According to state officials, cuts to the food tax and business taxes will cost the state $360 million in lost revenue this year, with more than half of the loss coming from the cuts to…
When we last looked at the proposal to raise West Virginia's minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.25 per hour, I showed that while West Virginia's workers' productivity was increasing, their wages weren't, making it an ideal time to raise the minimum wage. And while over 600 economists have joined together, stating that the weight of…
Recently, Revenue Secretary Bob Kiss and Revenue Deputy Secretary Mark Muchow made news by finally admitting that cuts in the business franchise and corporate net income tax, as well as cuts to the food tax, have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, to the tune of $360 million for FY 2015.…
A proposal to raise West Virginia's minimum wage is currently working its way through the legislature. If passed, the state's minimum wage would increase from its current level of $7.25 to $8.25. This would increase the wages of 113,000 West Virginia workers (and the parents of 42,000 children). Currently 21 states and the District of Columbia…
General revenue collections for December 2013 ended up $24.1 million below estimates, and are down $81.5 million for the year. The biggest underperformer so far has been the personal income tax, which is currently $63.9 million below estimate. So what is the cause of its poor performance? To understand why personal income tax revenue isn't…