“They’re saying we can’t afford it,” Ted Boettner, director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said of legislators. Although Republicans now control both chambers of the statehouse, the tax cuts that squeezed the state budget were a bipartisan undertaking. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who’s now one of the state’s two senators in Washington, had urged legislators to pursue the tax cuts in 2006, arguing that West Virginia needed to slash taxes on corporations in order to be competitive with other states. Over the same span, the state also created a family tax credit, increased its homestead exemption and got rid of an alternative minimum tax and corporate charter tax, according to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. All told, those cuts diminished state revenue by more than $425 million each year, the center estimates.

Source: Huffington Post March 02, 2018 21:56 UTC