Tim Kaine Scored Poorly on Cato Report

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has named Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Kaine was governor of Virginia from January 2006 to January 2010. I assessed Kaine on Cato’s fiscal report card in 2008, and he received a low grade of “D.”

I found:

Governor Kaine has campaigned vigorously to raise taxes and fees to fund higher transportation spending. In 2007, Kaine helped pass a large revenue package that included tax and fee increases, higher penalties for driving infractions, and the creation of regional taxing authorities within Virginia. The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the unelected tax authorities, and citizens hated the new driver penalties so much that they were repealed. Kaine supported a few tax cuts in 2007, including an increase in the bottom threshold of the individual income tax and a repeal of the estate tax. But in 2008, he is promoting an even bigger transportation plan that would increase taxes and fees by $1.1 billion annually, and he is advocating higher state borrowing to fund education and transportation. On spending, Kaine promoted a big increase in his first budget, but has favored greater restraint since then.

In Kaine’s first year, general fund spending jumped a remarkable 17 percent. But spending was flat the second year, and then declined 14 percent during Kaine’s final two years as the economy entered recession. Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Bart Hinkle gives Kaine credit for the spending cuts, but notes, “it’s clear that Kaine would much rather have preferred to balance the state budget by raising taxes.”

That was probably true of many governors at the time facing declining revenues from the sour economy. But thanks to balanced budget requirements, general fund spending across the 50 states was cut 9 percent those two years that Kaine was cutting.

Politifact says that Kaine tried unsuccessfully to raise taxes by $4 billion, which is a lot of money for a mid-sized state. Researching Kaine two and half years into his term, I included net proposed tax increases of $1.1 billion in my report. I included only one of his proposed transportation funding packages because I didn’t want to double count. Politifact may have included multiple transportation packages in its tally. Also, my report did not cover Kaine’s $1.9 billion proposed income tax increase in 2009, which the Washington Post discusses here.

Hinkle calls Kaine an “affable ideologue.” That’s a good description of Trump running mate Mike Pence as well, whose fiscal ideology of spending restraint and tax cutting earned him an “A” from Cato.