Columns

It speaks volumes when one of the most vocal supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, says it will “destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class” if not fixed. But that is what James Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union, made clear last year in a letter to Democratic leadership in Congress.

    There is a fallacy that I hear repeated without fail every year during budget time. Actually, it isn’t really a fallacy. It’s more of a half-truth. Every year at least one person, who is speaking before the supervisors urging them to raise taxes, will say that the tax rate was higher at some point in the past decade.
    These speakers are correct. It was 65 cents in 2006 and 73 cents in 2002.

Each year, families across Virginia set a household budget. Businesses in the Commonwealth, both large and small, do the same. This week, the House of Representatives acted on a budget plan for Fiscal Year 2015, which begins on October 1, 2014. In addition to laying out a blueprint for federal spending, the budget process is also an opportunity to strengthen programs like Medicare and Social Security and expand pro-growth economic reforms like tax reform, domestic energy production, and regulatory reform.

Nothing has probably defined the baby boomer generation in America more than the turbulent, inspiring, dangerous, and ultimately successful civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.
    In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated schools were unconstitutional, that it was a violation of the rights of black children to be forced, only because of race, to attend schools that were inferior to those of whites.