Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam revealed his proposed budget plan for the years 2020-2021 last month. The $135 billion budget, touted by the governor as “the most progressive in Virginia’s history,” would consist of minor improvements in spending on education and healthcare, largely funded through taxes on poor and working-class people while ensuring a business-friendly environment for major corporations. Last November, the Democratic Party gained control of Virginia’s legislative bodies, solidifying the party’s control of the state government from the governor’s office to the state Senate and House of Delegates. The Democrats’ trouncing of the Republicans was both an expression of popular hostility to the fascistic politics of the Trump administration, as well as an expression of a significant shift of support in the state’s wealthy suburbs from the Republican Party toward the Democrats.

After Northam’s administration was nearly toppled in early 2019, when yearbook photos from the 1980s revealed what appeared to be the college-aged Northam posing in blackface, the Democratic governor has sought to recast himself as a “racially sensitive” politician. In the current budget, this takes the form of several minor programs, such as a $22 million initiative toward combating mortality rates among minority women, and an even tighter adherence to the principles of “fiscal responsibility.” Northam promises a doubling of cigarette taxes from 30 to 60 cents per pack and a 20 percent tax increase on all other tobacco products in order to pay for subsidizing rates that health insurance companies offer patients with more costly needs. In addition, it calls for a yearly increase in gasoline tax by 4 cents per gallon for the next three years. Also included in the plan are the cancellation of a Republican-planned $110 rebate to taxpayers, halving the state vehicle registration fee, and removing the requirement for annual vehicle safety inspections. Further transportation fee revamping is also planned in order to find ways to tax alternative fuel vehicles.

Northam promises nearly $1.2 billion in spending on education, including a $145 million contribution from the state to award state teachers a meager 3 percent wage increase in 2021. Over $800 million of this earmarked money would be used for routine expenses included in every state budget while an additional $400 million in funding would be a mere drop in the bucket compared to the total amount that has been stripped from schools since the 2008-2009 financial crisis. According to a 2018 report released by Rutgers University, while Virginia is the 12th wealthiest state in the United States, it ranks in 49th place, or almost dead last, in terms of wage competitiveness for teachers.

Last January, thousands of teachers descended on the capital city of Richmond to demand better funding for education and living conditions, part of an international upsurge in the working class, led by educators, which began in 2018 in opposition to austerity which has only accelerated since then. Another protest is set for January 27, with so many teachers taking sick leave for that date that Richmond Public Schools will be closed.

In many of these struggles, workers were forced to take action independently of and in opposition to the trade union apparatus, who sought to tie workers’ initiatives to the bankrupt perspective of appeals to the Democratic Party and to “remember in November” to vote in supposed “progressive” legislators. Teachers were told this would address workers’ needs. As with the Democratic Party in Virginia’s latest budget proposal, workers were in no way able to find their needs addressed through the ballot box and the election of Democratic Party candidates. Instead, workers are coming face to face with the reality that only a mobilization of workers and youth, in opposition to the pro-corporate Democratic Party and its trade union supporters, armed with the perspective of revolutionary socialism and internationalism, can their social demands be met.
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hopefully there is reparation in budget or will we continue to be racism?

man of the color Wrote:
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> hopefully there is reparation in budget or will we
> continue to be racism?

Nope.