by David Pratt
Virginia tax conformity. Tax relief. Tax cuts. Giving your money back to you. Redistribution of wealth. Democrats trying to spend the windfall.
We have a fundamental problem when we allow Republicans to frame every debate. We lack a free press capable of explaining complicated legislation including annual budgets and tax code changes.
I have tried and failed to find a good article on this. I can’t find anything from delegates or senators or the governor or lieutenant governor making a case for whatever the hell they were trying to do against the Republican proposals which ended up winning the day. Is it too complicated for our Representatives to articulate? Maybe Del. Lee Carter can explain why he seemed to be the only Democrat fighting the Republicans. I pay attention to what he fights for.
Sinclair Broadcasting, a right-wing media conglomerate, has bought up many local TV stations. Just as significantly, this has given them a huge network of news websites to publish opinion pieces that end up dominating Google search results. And guess what? Most all of these TV station news websites and editorials talked about “tax relief!” Since when did we decide that the Trump tax scam was good for Virginia? Democrats talk about public education and then they roll over when it’s time to talk about spending priorities. It doesn’t matter to me if Northam’s initial proposal tried to help people with low and middle income if we we aren’t capable of negotiating from strength with Republicans and if we can’t leverage what they do against them with Democratic voters because we lack the language, the motivation, the eloquence, and the news outlets to influence our activist base. I swear to God 90 percent of the time we just talk about the mechanics of running for office and what happens in Richmond stays in Richmond.
Apparently other than BlueVirginia.us we’re not capable of writing about these things on a daily basis and publishing them in a way that people can find. Instead all the Dems go on John Frederick’s Tea Party radio network and even launch their own shows on that network. We’re letting them frame the debate day after day and week after week. The governor is so weak in a critical budget cycle that Kirk Cox and Tommy Norment got exactly what they wanted.
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