West Virginia's legislative session began this week and I already wish it was over. My annual prayer has been for the state to finally hit bottom politically, but were heading down like the family in the late great John Prine's song The Bottomless Lake.
The session officially kicked off with Governor Jim Justice's state of the state address. Justice was once the state's only billionaire, but recent news reports have placed him a bit below that level but still way ahead of the rest of us. He was elected as a Democrat in 2016 but switched parties the following year. He was reelected in 2020 and seems set on running against Senator Joe Manchin if the latter runs again in 2024.
He is perhaps best known for the prominent display of his English bull dog universally known here as Babydog. Usually these displays are of her frontal regions, although there has been at least one major exception to that.
If I had to describe him politically, I'd say he's kind of random. Compared to many state legislative leaders today, he looks pretty moderate. His address blended some good proposals, such as raises for teachers and public employees, investing money in the state's tottering Public Employees Insurance Agency, help to food banks and such with some in the not so much category. One of the worst is cutting the state income tax, WV's only progressive tax, by 50 percent over three years.
The rationale is that WV is running a budget surplus and doesn't need the money, but that's due to low budget estimates, years of flat budgets, federal COVID money and a spike in severance tax revenues that are extremely volatile. In other words, it's a sugar high, although most people here don't feel it.
That would mean an annual loss of revenue of around $1.2 billion per year when fully implemented, coming after several years of a state budget that didn't keep up with inflation. This would mean cuts to all kinds of programs from child care to K-12 to early childhood to higher ed to human services at a time of great and unmet needs. I was please to work on a press conference about this and other issues (see here and here) yesterday.
But the event made me think of a self-esteem saving way of always declaring victory when you try to pull something like that together that I cooked up with a friend years ago. It goes like this:
*if you plan to rally the masses and generate media coverage and the masses don't show up but the media does, pretend you just planned a press conference all along;
*if you plan to rally the masses and generate media coverage and the only people who show up are your cronies, pretend you just planned a meeting all along;
*if you plan to rally the masses and generate media coverage and not even your cronies show up, pretend you're just looking around and that was what you meant to do all along.
The main thing is to declare victory, even if it has to be drastically redefined.
So there.
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