Credit check

We received an interesting article last week from Capital News Service, which is an arm of the journalism school of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Upper-level students cover the General Assembly, sending their usually excellent reports to newspapers that serve the constituents of the senators and delegates on whom the individual students focus.

There are also plenty of stories of interest to everyone in the commonwealth, such as last week’s report that “progressives and conservatives...have placed ending the tax credits, which cost the commonwealth billions of dollars in lost revenue, high on their agenda for 2012.”

Without stirring up those Warrenton officials who are sensitive about the Mosby house, nor those Civil War enthusiasts to whom any question about it is heresy, we are, nevertheless, obliged to wonder what affect this bipartisan Richmond crusade might have on plans to use tax credits to finally finish and open the museum.

Democratic Delegate David Englin (Alexandria), the article reported, “wants to shine a light on tax loopholes that allow companies [or towns, apparently, through complex corporate constructions that defy easy description] to keep money that could be stuffed into state coffers.

“The vast majority of our agenda will be working against many of their initiatives,” Englin said — “they” being Republicans — but ending many tax credits “is one area where I think liberals and conservatives can find common ground.”

Which goes to the point of the editorial stance we took a few weeks ago, and for which we were pilloried by town officials and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

“...behind this entire enterprise is the notion that we can own and operate a museum without it costing Warrenton taxpayers anything...by using tax credits,” we wrote.

“Tax credits, this scenario apparently concludes, don’t come out of the pockets of every Virginia taxpayer.”

Democrats and Republicans in Richmond have determined otherwise, and want to have a look at each and every one of them currently on the books.

A 2008 study showed Virginia taxpayers handed out $12.5 billion in tax incentives to special interests — an amount nearly equal to the $14.3 billion in revenue collected that year.

That’s not to say that some, perhaps even all of the tax credits won’t be retained.

But we are delighted that elected representatives of every political stripe want to take a look at them, at what they are buying, and at what they are costing Virginia taxpayers in slashed goods and services that, in their absence, we might have been able to afford.