OPINION:
Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor of Virginia under the guise of being a moderate. However, the leftist policies she and her party are proposing, especially regarding taxes, are already proving otherwise.
Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler is joined by Virginia State Senator Bryce Reeves on Politically Unstable to dive into what is really going on in Virginia, and how Governor Spanberger is not the moderate the media claimed her to be.
[SADLER] The media promised us that she was a moderate Democrat, but so far, she’s only been in office for a few weeks. There’s been 50 new taxes that have come out of the state legislature. Tax proposals, everything from dog walking to vehicle repairs, concerts, lawn care, we’re all going to be taxed on. And the latest was a tax on fantasy sports contests.
So, Senator, I want to ask you, how does this help the affordability crisis in our state and make things less expensive?
[REEVES] Well, they are making it more affordable for government to take your money. They didn’t necessarily say they were going to make it affordable for their citizens, right? She’s a great wordsmith. So she’s making it more affordable for the government literally to take your money. That’s just a portion of the taxes. They’re going to start taxing silencers on firearms — if they allow us to even have them — when those come out.
Look, the Democrats campaigned on it. They’re great at lying at what they do. That’s just a pure fact. The first week and a half that the governor is supposed to be here, really kind of leading the legislature in her key legislation, she’s been out gallivanting around the country as the sweetheart of the Democrat Party, going to New Jersey for that swear-in and doing talk shows and everything but that. And the first bill she’s going to sign is a bill that’s going to cost taxpayers in the Commonwealth of Virginia $5 million because that’s the redistricting bill, which a lower court already put an injunction in and said, wait a minute, you’re violating the Constitution and yet you’re doing a retroactively try to go back to 1971 and fix that. They’re violating the Constitution to validate what they’re trying to do.
We have turned into Sacramento on the East Coast, and it’s just really a shame to see. She talked a big game. We were all very hopeful that she would actually govern from the center left, but she’s so far left now. We can’t even see her because she’s not in the state.
[SADLER] Did Governor Youngkin, the former Republican governor, leave her with a huge budget deficit that needs to be balanced with all of these new taxes that the Democrats are proposing?
[REEVES] No, Kelly. In fact, we’ve got a few billion dollars worth of surplus. Governor Youngkin left us in a phenomenal position where we’re able to give money back to our citizens, hardworking money that they earn. And the reality is, if you look at all the budget bills that have come in, and I serve on our Senate Finance Committee so I see everything that comes in, I’m on the subcommittee for Health and Human Resources, they’re willing to start spending all this money just out of nowhere and yet that’s still not enough. They want to not only spend the surplus that we have so we can keep our AAA bond rating. They want to go above and beyond that.
[SADLER] Spending the money on what exactly? What are the new proposals? What do we need to spend money on in the state that wasn’t working for us for the last four years?
[REEVES] Well, listen, we got out of the regional greenhouse gas initiatives and Governor Shapiro was smart to take his state out of that. They’re going to jump right back into that and that’s immediately going to cost us $500 million a year. The truth is, and everybody knows it, is that, everybody wants renewable, but it doesn’t sustain us. We buy 37 to 40 percent of our energy costs out of state. We don’t produce enough because we don’t have enough of our old ways of producing energy. So we’ve got to look at nuclear. We’re doing that, but you can’t tie the hands of government. You know, we’re about to get a big snowstorm again and people’s heating costs are going to go up. I mean, that’s not affordable to tie us back into RGGI. And when you look at all the other things that they’re talking about, it’s frustrating.
You know, we had bills in, no tax on tips, no grocery tax. We’re trying to get rid of the car tax. We have a surplus. We could actually save citizens money right now based on what we’ve calculated in our caucus. Right now, every citizen that pays taxes, their yearly bill is going to go up by at least $2,800 a year right now just with the bills that we know have gone through. That’s not the ones, Kelly, that you mentioned that haven’t gone through the whole process yet. So you’re looking at, you could be up to $5,000 to $6,000 more a year. It’s going to cost Virginians to get us entangled on all these silly things.
They want to have, you know, maternity leave forever and ever and ever. Look, we’d love to do a lot of those things, but that’s not going to make it more affordable for all Virginians. That’s going to make life easier for a few Virginians while they’re going through that process, but we’re all going to have to pay for it.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
Read more:
- Virginia Democrats go all in on tax hikes after campaigning on affordability
- Political whiplash: Virginia lurches left under Spanberger and Democratic lawmakers
- Newly sworn-in Gov. Spanberger turns Virginia into a sanctuary state
- Abigail Spanberger sworn in as Virginia’s first female governor, vowing to lower cost of living
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