This morning, Governor Glenn Youngkin delivered an address on Fiscal Year 2025 to the Virginia General Assembly’s Joint Money Committee. Not surprisingly, given that Youngkin is a pathological liar, and also that the economic situation under Donald Trump’s and Glenn Youngkin’s “leadership” is deteriorating rapidly – but of course Youngkin can’t admit that, because he has (delusional) ambitions to be elected VP or president in 2028 – Youngkin told a bunch of whoppers in his presentation, as did his Finance Secretary, Stephen Cummings. Fortunately, several Democratic legislators called out the b.s. and disinformation, as you can see in the following video and highlights. I’d say “enjoy,” except there’s not a lot that’s actually enjoyable about any of this, as Virginians are getting nailed by DOGE, the Trump administration, the Big Ugly Bill (including massive cuts to Medicaid), etc. Bad, bad, bad…
- So first, as VAPLAN (Cindy) tweeted: “Youngkin begins his statement on where Virginia’s economy is at currently with the claim that we have $1.7 billion in ‘cushion.’ Which falls well short of the $2.6 billion Virginia is expected to lose due to Trump’s actions.”
- Also from VAPLAN: “In addition to preserving ‘right to work’ and ‘unwinding’ the clean energy goals, above all, it’s important that ‘we don’t convert back to when Virginia wasn’t business-friendly,’ says Governor during whose term Virginia dropped on that ranking from #1 to #4.
- And then there’s this whopper by Youngkin: “‘Nobody is losing Medicaid,’ Youngkin says. ‘It was not designed for able-bodied people who could be working.’ Nobody is losing it, they’re just not going to qualify for it. Okay, got it.”
- So here’s the actual situation: “Things looking bad for jobs in Virginia–bear in mind that most federal workers who took ‘The Fork’ don’t actually become unemployed until September 28 (or end of December if in the second wave). Note espec. manufacturing jobs dismal here (despite the beloved ‘right to work’).”
- This is just bizarre: “Youngkin’s finance person reports that hospital Medicaid reimbursement cuts will be gradual and start in 2028, so NBD! @CreighDeeds: So when these hospitals go from $499 million/yr to $230 million/yr, is it your position that no one will lose services because of that???”
- Del. Candi Mundon King “asks Youngkin’s finance guy after his presentation to Joint Money Committee: ‘These numbers rely a lot on BLS numbers, are these from before or after Trump fired everyone?’ He ironically says ‘it can’t be viewed to be a politically-motivated number.'” LOL!
- Then “[Youngkin’s] own finance guy undermines this argument from Youngkin (as Del Watts points out) by explaining this is a historic level of committed but unspent (won’t be spent until next fiscal year) revenue dollars, which is inflating the size of his ‘cushion,’ which is only $0.48 billion.”
- Sen. Ghazala Hashmi “asks Youngkin’s finance guy: One thing I haven’t heard mentioned here today at all is the health of our Virginia agricultural industry, between the workforce reductions due to ICE actions, cuts to USDA, USAID, tariffs making inputs more expensive, etc.”
Also, excellent questions/points by Sen. Scott Surovell, Sen. Barbara Favola, etc.
- Sen. Surovell: “The governor stood up here and said a million times, repeatedly, nobody’s [going to be] thrown off of Medicaid. The Congressional Research Service, which is the agency America relies upon to tell us the answers to these things, says that millions of Americans are going to lose their Medicaid. I want to know that why the governor thinks the Congressional Research Service, that Congress relies on, doesn’t know what they’re talking about, because apparently he’s decided he’s smarter than them…There’s 100,000 Virginians that are going to lose their health insurance coverage according to the State Corporation Commission, pursuant to a report they put out last week…and that’s going to happen on January 1, before this governor leaves office. I want to know if the governor has a solution or a plan to save the health insurance for those 100,000 people, or whether he’s going to actually point the finger at the Republican Congress…A lot of these slides sort of flip between Virginia mumbers and federal numbers, depending on which people want to cite, because some look better than others…Today, Bloomberg reported that wholesale inflation in America accelerated in July by the most in three years…Now we’ve got Trump inflation…BLS on July 18 said Virginia was the only state in America where unemployment rose – the only one…Northern Virginia real estate market is starting to crater, and that’s the engine of this state’s economy. And so, while you might think the Commonwealth’s strong, there are a whole lot of red flags on the horizon, hurricane warnings that are coming, and that’s the kind of stuff that I’m worried about…”
- Sen. Favola: “One incredibly important gap that’s missing from all of your slides is it is going to cost us…large amounts of money to meet the administrative burden of implementing programs…I’ve heard…millions of dollars…to set up a Medicaid program that will enable recipients to apply every six months; a program we have to set up for SNAP that will monitor our error rate risk, with the expectation that if we go over a certain level, we could be at risk of losing federal dollars. This is an incredibly burdensome operation…putting money into administrative overhead rather than the programs.”
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