Not very useful was an editorial in last week’s newspaper focusing on partisan blaming of the opposition party for things that have yet to happen, while mischaracterizing some things that did happen. So much more progress could be made if our politicians chose to work together, rather than follow strict party ideology formulated in Washington and by wealthy donating groups and individuals.
Let’s start first with the characterization of the recent past as a great period for Virginia, made great by Republican government. Whatever anyone thinks of the past years, there is no denying that we had a Republican governor and Democrat majority legislature in 2024 and 2025. So whatever happened, good or bad, needs to be attributed to both parties. More descriptive of our past government may be that not much got done. For example, in 2024 our Republican governor vetoed more bills in that one year than any of the past seven Virginia governors had done during their entire four-year terms. Wow! Over his four-year term he vetoed over 400 bills. Clearly, this was not a productive time for Virginia’s government.
Another claim was that the economy was strong in Virginia at the end of 2025, but now would be badly damaged by the Democrats. Not very helpful are claims such as these – placing blame for things yet to come! It would be much better if all of our legislators worked hard to see that our economy remained robust, rather than one side just pointing a finger at the other.
Was the local economy really that great at the end of 2025? Certainly, there were people doing well, but many faced large financial challenges. Virginia had been rated as one of the top three states for business between 2019 and 2024 – and first in 2024. In 2025 its ranking slipped all the way to fourth – surely not a sign of a healthy economy. This slippage came about while the U.S. government’s economy was noted as the “Envy of the World” in the October 2024 issue of the Economist, which described our national economy as leaving “other rich countries in the dust.” Of course, things changed a lot in 2025. Now Virginia is facing a massive loss of revenue from the federal government, so the days of large budget surpluses are long gone. If we try to even support current programs, more money is going to be needed. It is simply inaccurate to blame this loss of federal funding on the Democrats – as it happened as part of the Republican driven national budget. Our local economy going forward into 2026 faces enormous challenges.
We can like or dislike the national budget, or like or dislike the state budget, but it is unfair to attribute problems resulting from a political party’s policies to the other party. Our Virginia leaders now have to deal with decreased revenue (because of the federal budget) without a decrease in need. So, what should they do? Should services be decreased? Do we want people to go hungry, schools to lack funding, or people to suffer from treatable health problems? Do we want to individually pay much more for health insurance? Perhaps we want to tax the rich more, as a relatively small percentage of their wealth is currently taxed (usually a much lower percentage of their income than the tax of middle-income people)? Wonderful would be to hear from our elected officials what we should actually do rather than just complain about the other side.
