Campaigns Need to Focus on Ideas - not Baseless Attacks

The following is a post from my friend Mike Thompson. Mike is the President of the Thomas Jefferson Institute

"It's becoming "silly time" in our Virginia Governor's campaign. The candidates spend too much time attacking each other and not enough in offering positive policy alternatives.

A case in point is Terry McAuliffe's recent attack on Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's jobs plan. Cuccinelli has proposed specific personal and business tax cuts that will help grow our economy. That plan announced in May has specific tax cuts and it pledges to hold future budget increases to the rate of inflation and population growth. Those tax cuts will be paid for (thus "revenue neutral") by eliminating outdated or unproductive corporate tax credits and capping the growth on state spending, without any budget cuts to education programs or any other state program. For the McAuliffe campaign to say that the Cuccinelli tax cuts will take money from education is simply not the case.

The Thomas Jefferson Institute has reviewed the economic development plans for the two candidates. Cuccinelli's has specifics and we have run those through our economic model and it shows it will create more than 50,000 new jobs over five years. We had hoped that the McAuliffe campaign would have specifics in its plan by now, but so far they are not there. We would very much like to run the McAuliffe specifics through our tax model and compare the two candidate's plans head-to-head.

We encourage both campaigns to focus on the issues and to offer positive and creative alternatives that will grow Virginia economy and improve our state over the next four years."