BECKLEY, WV (LOOTPRESS) – Governor Jim Justice met at the Tamarack with the residents of Raleigh County Thursday afternoon for a Town Hall meeting to discuss, among other issues, the WV House of Delegates recent passage of a bill which stands to substantially decrease personal income tax for West Virginians.
The event attracted a substantial turnout on the chilly Thursday as residents of Beckley filed into the Tamarack building to hear the Governor’s thoughts and, in the case of some, to give their own. The conference room in which the event was set to occur had to be expanded in order to accommodate the sheer number of residents who came out, resulting in a minor delay of the proceedings.
While the Governor touched on a multitude of topics during his hour-and-a-half-plus time before the assembly of onlookers, the primary focus of the discussion was House Bill 2526 which passed through the House of Delegates last Wednesday in a near-unanimous vote.
The bill provides for reduced graduated income tax rates, reduce the rate of withholding tax on nonresident income, reduce the rate of withholding tax on the nonresident sale of real estate, reduce the rate of tax on composite returns, and reduce the rate of withholding on gambling winnings, among other changes. Perhaps most notably, the legislation entails a 50% cut on the state income tax over an extended span.
“Cutting our personal income tax will put money in the pockets of hardworking West Virginians and bring prosperity to our state for generations. There is no better incentive than this. Period,”
Declared Governor Justice upon the bill’s passage last week.
“[It] puts West Virginia on a pathway to eventually eliminate the personal income tax entirely, which will drive phenomenal growth to our state for generations to come. With the unbelievable economic growth our state has achieved, now is the time to provide this major tax break for our people.”
WV Department of Revenue Secretary Dave Hardy accompanied the Governor at the event and briefly detailed the statistics behind the administration’s push for a decrease in – and eventual elimination of – the income tax.
“We looked at the most recent data available. They took a look at a 10 year period between 2008 and 2018 and they compared the nine states that don’t have an income tax with the 41 states that do,” said Secretary Hardy, going on to point out the discrepancies in growth between states with and without such a tax, drawing particular parallels between West Virginia and the southern neighboring state of Tennessee.
“Of course Florida doesn’t have a state income tax, but Florida has Mickey Mouse and everybody understands that, but we’re talking about states like Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Nevada. The one that we looked at a lot was Tennessee, because there’s a lot of parallels between Tennessee and West Virginia. On average, those states in that period of 10 years, their population growth was twice as fast as the other 41 states. Their economies in those nine states grew 56% faster than the economies in the other 41 states.”
Governor Justice maintains, based upon the economic patterns of similar areas, that the tax change would help to grow the population of West Virginia and, as a result, would provide a much needed boost to the state’s workforce.
“We’ve got to bring people to the state. We’ve got to have people move here, young people that want to work,” said Governor Justice, praising those currently working in the area. “We’ve got for the overwhelming majority of our folks, thank God, they are workers. They love to be here, they love their job and they work and they work really hard.”
Vice President of Jan-Care Ambulance Service Todd Cornett was also in attendance for the event and echoed the state-wide need for workers, citing no shortage of business but a general lack of access to viable employees for one of the area’s most recognized healthcare providers.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in here who’s a business owner or manager who can tell you that they do not need employees right now. I would have never believed in my lifetime that the problem for us would be getting employees,” Cornett said.
“To me, the way to fill our ranks is taking every step to put more money back into the pockets of the people who work for us, and I think this is a great step towards doing that. It takes it out of the hands of the corporate. Instead of being a corporate tax and then deciding where it goes, this goes directly back into the pocket of the working man and woman, and that is the reason I support this.
We need to now take advantage of every opportunity we can to put money in the pocket of everybody who could make a determination of ‘how do I need to spend it?’ Not what somebody else thinks it needs to be spent on. There may be better plans, people may think they have better plans. But at the end of the day, if you take money that’s going into tax revenue and you give it directly back to the people, whoever you’re talking about in this room, it’s going to help us recruit and maintain team members – to keep them here, and that’s why I do support this.”
While Governor Justice has been adamant about the necessity of bringing more residents and workers into West Virginia, he asserted Thursday that this could not be brought about by way of making cuts to state services or by increasing existing taxes.
“We have to have more people here, but along the way we can’t cut services. We need to grow services and that’s what we’re doing. That’s what this budget does,” Governor Justice said.
“We do not need to raise sales taxes. We do not need to raise your property taxes. We do not need to do the things that other states have done to be able to preserve a low or an eradication of the income tax, we don’t need to do that.”
The Governor doubled down on his insistence that state refrain from cutting services, citing the cuts of past administrations as a longstanding issue and contributor to existing problems throughout the state – one of the problems in question being the rate at which residents are departing for opportunities which they believe can be found in other areas, further contributing to economic deficits at home.
“West Virginia – and I don’t say this egotistically – but when I walked in the door – like it or not like it – we were dead level bankrupt,” he said. “We didn’t really have anywhere to turn. All we really knew we could do is cut, and cut and cut – and cut we did, before I got there. Through all the cuts, you know what else happened every time we cut? People left West Virginia, and every time they left, they took their income with them.”
Several crowd participants queried the governor on state issues and voiced their concerns in a number of areas. Among the topics addressed by Governor Justice during the event were,
Energy: “We should be proud of our coal miners; We should be proud of our gas workers; We should be proud of our electrical workers. But our economies need to be diversified. We don’t need to turn our back on any energy source. We want to expand on our coal and our gas.”
Education: “On the first day, I said ‘state education should be our centerpiece.’ The first thing that people look at when they’re going to come to a state is ‘how are the schools?,’ and the second thing they look at is, ‘how are the roads?,’ I guarantee you that’s the way it is.”
Elderly residents: “We are doing everything possibly imaginable to try and take care of our seniors. Retirees get pushed to the side and that’s not right.”
COVID-19 vaccines: “We don’t mandate it, you’re free to do what you want. But I just had Covid and I am thankful I was fully boosted. It turned it into a cold.”
Economics: “If the money’s right then absolutely everything else falls into place.”
Amendment 2: “To those that are upset about it: get over it. The people voted. We’re supposed to do the people’s job, not what we think.”
Thursday’s Town Hall at the Tamarack in Raleigh County was the second in a three-part series of stops for Governor Justice who visited Parkersburg to address residents at the City Council Chambers on Wednesday.
Governor Justice, at the time of writing, is conducting a town hall in Wheeling at West Virginia Independence Hall on Market Street. This event can be viewed via live stream here.