Wow, what a fantastic editorial by Don Surber. Check it out below or in today’s Daily Mail.

by Don Surber, Charleston Daily Mail

MY reaction to Gov. Joe Manchin’s food tax plan was sung by Peggy Lee many years ago. Her song was “Is That All There Is?”
As part of his tax “reform” plan, Manchin is calling for a penny-per-dollar reduction in the food tax next year and maybe the year after that.

Is that all there is?

And will it be a tax cut? The West Virginia Tax Modernization Project proposed a number of revenue measures as well.

First the facts, then the opinion.

Manchin increased state spending by 14 percent this year alone.

State general revenue spending rose from $3,190,336,810 last year to $3,629,100,000 this year.

That is a one-year increase of $438.7 million. Need I say it is the largest single-year spending increase in the state’s history?

Now for the opinion.

But I really do not have to give my opinion. Daily Mail readers are smart enough to figure this thing out.

Manchin is not a conservative, pro-business Democrat. He is just another spendaholic governor in the mold of Jay Rockefeller, Gaston Caperton and Bob Wise.

Give business a slogan — “Open for Business” — but extend state government’s reach around the throats of the people.

After 25 years of newspapering in this state, I have finally figured it out:

The powers that be in the state like the state to be down and out and poor.

They no more want to end poverty in West Virginia than they want to end vote fraud in Southern West Virginia.

Both conditions keep them in power.

I hope Manchin’s food tax ploy is too little way too late. I hope this is the election that turns state politics on its head. I hope Republicans take over the Legislature for the first time since 1932.

Coal baron Don Blankenship is leading the charge of the elephants.

He spent more than a million bucks of his own money to blast Democratic deadwood in the Legislature. He is doing it by telling voters how the Democrats voted.

How that must hurt them.

Manchin is trying to head Blankenship off at the pass on the food tax.

This year, 18 years after it was enacted, the Democratic Legislature finally rolled it back a penny on the dollar to 5 percent.

Some observers called this prudent.

It was not. It was a farce. It was a charade.

The Democratic governor and the Democratic Legislature increased the budget by that $438.7 million and socked away a surplus of $300 million to $400 million, depending on whose press release is to be believed.

Only then did they knock the food tax down by $25 million.

Maintaining the food tax is imprudent, because that tax hurts grocers all along the Ohio and the rest of West Virginia’s borders.

Manchin’s sudden call eight days before the election to take a second penny off the food tax shows that Blankenship’s campaign must be working.

Manchin’s yes-men and yes-women in the Legislature must be polling poorly. Otherwise, Manchin would have waited until after the election to announce his tax “reform” plan.

His plan is just another excuse to increase taxes. I suspect any tax cut will be offset by a larger tax increase elsewhere.

Not one penny will be cut from state government.

The plan by Manchin is the same one used by Rockefeller, Caperton and Wise: State government will tax our way into prosperity.

Do I really have to remind people where we rank among the states in per capita income?

Remember those ancestors who came here to escape the potato famine in Ireland?

Ireland’s per capita income now is higher than West Virginia. The Emerald Island has slashed taxes, cut regulations and attracted new businesses.

That could happen here.

But not with Democrats running the Legislature.