Gov. Youngkin will propose tax relief of approximately $400 million in upcoming budget
RICHMOND, Va. — On Friday morning in Richmond, Governor Glenn Youngkin gave a formal speech presenting a financial road map for the state’s plans to transfer excess funds totaling $3.2 billion to the Commonwealth.
The funds, which were formally announced at a meeting of the House and Senate Joint Money Committee, come from a combination of $1.2 billion in unspent appropriations and $2 billion in unplanned revenues from the last fiscal year.
Even though a lot of the money has already been set aside to go back into the state, Governor Youngkin has said that he wants to give Virginians some of that money back in the form of lower taxes.
“While the statute requires every dollar of the surplus to be assigned on the balance sheet, the right thing to do is to return unplanned revenue to taxpayers. It’s not our money. It belongs to hard-working taxpayers of Virginia. Last July, in one of the earliest proposals from our campaign, we proposed sending refund checks back to Virginians, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Youngkin said.
According to Youngkin, in a set of budget proposals that will be presented in December, he would propose transferring $397 million of the excess funds in the form of tax relief.
“When government collects more money than it anticipates, when government spends less than it plans, it only makes sense to give it back to the people who earned it,” he said.
The governor of Virginia also talked about how the state wants to “lower the cost of doing business in Virginia.” He used North Carolina as an example of a state that lowered taxes on businesses to attract new jobs and investment.
Other state officials indicated that Virginia is still falling behind its neighbors and “competitor” states in terms of the rate at which employment is recovering. These states include North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and Texas.
The slides that were presented at that meeting indicated that the job level in Virginia is still 2.7% lower than it was before the pandemic began in February of 2020.
