Virginia General Pre-Assembly Testimonies
by FCTA's Charles McAndrew at Fx Co Gov't Center, 01/03/2019
My speech at the Virginia Senate Finance Committee yesterday, I mentioned that the General Assembly should increase the Virginia standard deduction DOUBLE from $3,000 for single payers and $6,000 for a couple. For the past 30 years, it has been about the same. The "$3,000" figure has remained the same and the "$6,000" figure was slightly increased from "$5,000" and basically it has not changed much. I stated that some of these excess tax revenues should be given back to the taxpayers of Virginia. More taxpayers, filing their Federal taxes, will be using the STANDARD DEDUCTION as the Federal standard deduction will DOUBLE to $12,000 for a single taxpayer and $24,000 for a couple. So if you file Federal taxes and itemize, you MUST itemize for the State. If you use the Federal standard deduction, you MUST use the Virginia standard deduction. Basically, we are asking the General Assembly to DOUBLE the Virginia STANDARD DEDUCTION and refund some of the excess revenue back to Virginia taxpayers. This is the position of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance.
I also stated that Virginia needs to concentrate on proper funding of TRANSPORTATION. It was good that they financed WMATA (METRO) with $150 million per year, BUT they took that money out of the TRANSPORTATION FUNDS! So I mentioned that earlier on in the meeting, Sharon Bulova, Fairfax County Chairman stated that Fairfax needs to pursue $102 million for improving transportation which I hope that means ROADS! I stated that two previous Delegates of the 67th House District, my good friends Chuck Caputo and Jim LeMunyon told me that, while campaigning for office, they went around to approximately 15,000 households and the number one issue was TRANSPORTATION. So I asked the General Assembly members at this meeting to focus on properly funding transportation for Fairfax County.
Besides me speaking for three minutes, we had Art Purves, our FCTA President hand out graphs and speaking on the problems of the Fairfax County public school system. We also had Tom Cranmer, Vice President of FCTA speak on the Virginia Retirement System and the bad estimates on their investments, and that Virginia is behind in the USA on personal income and employment growth, and also that Virginia's budget for MEDICAID does not reflect realistic requirements and that the costs are grossly underestimated. They both did a great job! However, we needed more speakers for our positions! There were a total of 57 speakers at the Fairfax County Government Center on Thursday 3 January 2019. Most of these speakers were requesting more funding for health care problems and various disabilities.