Bob McDonnell Slashes Education, Programs For State's Poorest and Most Vulnerable Residents

It took a few weeks, but Pat Roberton's Manchurian Candidate Governor has now shown his true colors once and for all. And they're not pretty.

Gov. Bob McDonnell's budget-cutting strategy ranges from deep cuts in base funding for public schools to state worker furloughs and eliminating programs to aid the homeless, according to confidential legislative working papers.

[...]

The document shows that McDonnell wants to cut $730 million in state support to local schools from kindergarten through high school.

The largest bite comes from resetting the funding base to that used in fiscal year 2006, a two-year reduction totaling $225 million. Other cuts to education include $130 million from removing state salary supplements for sports coaches and department chairs, nearly $92 million from eliminating initiatives such as Mentor Teacher and school breakfast programs and nearly $20 million in savings from extending the work lives of school buses.

[...]

The new Republican governor, just one month in office, also recommends nearly $300 million in cuts to Health and Human Resources programs, the legislative summary says. Some of those programs are a lifeline to the state's poorest residents.

Of course, all of this was pretty much inevitable, given two things: 1) McDonnell's absolute unwillingness to raise taxes (even the estate tax on super-rich Virginia families); and 2) his rigid adherence to heartless (and disastrous) supply-side, trickle-down, Bush-o-nomics policies that favor the rich and powerful over the poor and middle class. Now, can we all stop the nonsense about how Bob McDonnell is really a "moderate" who we can "work with," blah blah blah? He's not, and we can't. End of story.

UPDATE: Elaine in Roanoke has an excellent analysis of this, appropriately entitled "Vicious Budget Cuts, Cowardly Governor." So true.

Also, someone left a comment on my Facebook page which read, in part, "it looks like the Commonwealth is returning to some very dark days...it's embarrassing to watch the Warner-Kaine years go up in smoke so quickly." I couldn't agree more.

UPDATE #2: The Washington Post reports, "McDonnell is proposing deep cuts to core services in K-12 education and health and human services." Here are all the cuts. Not good, not good at all.