The Good, the Bad and the Stupid Pt. 1

January 19, 2023

The Legislature is back in session, which means it’s time for the return of “The Good, the Bad and the Stupid” — a weekly roundup of bills moving through the state’s capitol, categorized by whether we believe the legislation to be something good for the state, bad for the state or just plain stupid. All three of the bills below have already passed the Senate and await consideration in the House of Delegates. Without further ado, here’s the first “The Good, the Bad and the Stupid” of 2023. Good: SB 127, to increase Public Employee Insurance Agency reimbursement rates. ...

Tax cuts would line richest’s pockets, drain state coffers

January 18, 2023

Yesterday, Gov. Jim Justice’s personal income tax cut, introduced as HB 2526, passed the House of Delegates and moved on to the Senate, where we’re sure it will undergo some changes — if it doesn’t get scrapped entirely. But for our purposes, we’re going to discuss the proposal in its current form. HB 2526 initiates a gradual income tax cut that starts with 30% the first year, then 10% each of the next two years. Which means that by the end of year three, the income tax rates will be half of what they are now: from 3% to 1.5% for the lowest tax bracket and from 6.5% to ...

Rhetoric 101: How they get you to buy what they’re selling

January 17, 2023

In a world where the line between fact reporting and opinion spouting is increasingly blurry and politicians put spin on everything, we want to help our readers better understand some of the rhetorical devices employed to get them to think one way or another. This will be the first in what we hope to be a recurring segment on media literacy and logical fallacies. We can thank the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle for defining the three building blocks of all arguments: Logos is an appeal to logic; ethos, an appeal to authority; and pathos, an appeal to emotion. None of the above ...

Bad budget now means funding failure later

January 14, 2023

During his State of the State address, Gov. Jim Justice presented the Legislature with an essentially flat budget — again. There is a slight increase of about 5.53%, from $4.636 billion to $4.884 billion, that accommodates a 5% raise for most state employees as well as a one-time cash infusion for the Public Employees Insurance Agency and a small boost to school funding. Justice’s persistent flat budgets have contributed to astronomical surpluses the last few years — on track to be over $1 billion this fiscal year — but they have also contributed to the abysmal failure of ...

Warner to fight D.C. ‘wokeism’ … as governor?

January 12, 2023

Mac Warner says he’s going to fight the “wokeism” and “absolute silliness” of Washington, D.C., because “We don’t want their liberal agenda, we don’t want 87,000 new IRS agents, we don’t want child mutilation, and we want parents to have control in our children’s education!” Which is why he’s running for … governor? In a lengthy speech announcing his candidacy for the highest office in West Virginia, the current secretary of state dedicated one sentence to his plans for the Mountain State — a string of generic and insubstantial buzzwords that we all ...

Strange weather becoming normal

January 12, 2023

Too many people believe that snow and cold weather are proof that “global warming” is a hoax, but no one ever said climate change meant no more snow. Rather, while winters have become more mild, the weather — when it does hit — has become more severe. As evidenced by the bomb cyclone that paralyzed the whole U.S. over Christmas, the thunderstorms that swept across the state on Thursday and the potential for another ice storm tonight. According to data gathered by USA Facts, a nonpartisan analytics organization, virtually every December in West Virginia since 2010 has been ...