Go Senator McEachin, you rock!
...it is not the members of this Senate who have put us in the predicament that we are faced with in trying to craft a budget...Well, Mr. President, it is the governor, it is the governor of this Commonwealth who has laid down the gauntlet, who has said that if we try to raise any new revenue, either through taxes or any other means short of something called perhaps fees, that he will not sign that budget, that he will veto that budget. So the gauntlet has been laid down, not by the members of this Senate, but by the governor on the third floor.
Mr. President, I for one cannot cotton, cannot accept the notion that we are about to even begin to conceive of crafting a budget that contains no new revenue. I'm happy to work with any member of this body in moving towards that reality. But make no mistake about it, Mr. President, we are morally bankrupt if we decide to balance this budget on the backs of the poor, on the backs of those who are vulnerable, on the backs of those who live in the margins. We are morally bankrupt, Mr. President, if we decide to balance this budget by putting more people out of work.
We all said we were for jobs, Mr. President, but what we have failed to tell the people of Virginia is that these budget cuts, we're no longer talking about fat, we're down to bone. As the Senator from Fairfax has said, we're down to amputations, Mr. President. We cannot put more people out of work, it is wrong, we ought not be about that business, and the words coming that have been coming from this side of the aisle, by those who have taken to this floor, have been trying to draw the connection between these budget cuts and loss of jobs.
We need 8,000 jobs a month just to catch up with the 201,000 jobs we've lost since 2007. I do not see any leadership from the third floor in that regard, and quite frankly Mr. President, after this past campaign, when we saw "Bob for Jobs," I expected better, and I do consider that to be a failure of the standards of leadership.
