Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994 TAG: 9407180139
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Slashed appropriations to state colleges and universities, hoisting tuition rates for students and their families and threatening the system's reputation for academic excellence.
Given up on the goal, almost attained in the mid-'80s, of bringing Virginia teacher salaries up to the national average, and failed to provide the funds necessary to ensure equal educational opportunities for all youngsters, regardless of where they live in the state.
Largely ignored the need for comprehensive preschool educational and health programs to promote better preparedness for learning among disadvantaged children.
Failed to ensure access to the kinds of resources - day-care support, transportation help - that are key to any meaningful effort to move people off welfare rolls and into self-sufficiency.
The other day, meeting in special session and with the encouragement of Gov. George Allen, the General Assembly of Virginia ...
Agreed to pay $340 million, over five years, to federal pensioners who claim they were illegally taxed prior to a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a provision of Virginia's (and other states') tax laws.
Increased the benefits for state retirees by 3 percent, beginning Oct. 1, at an initial cost of $70 million.
Spread the goodies to private-sector Social Security recipients by liberalizing the exclusion of Social Security benefits from taxable income, at an estimated cost of $120 million over the next three years.
Notice a pattern here?
Key words in the first list are "students and their families," "youngsters" and "children." These, the state would bust.
Key words in the second list are "pensioners," "retirees" and "Social Security recipients." These, the state would boost.
The settlement with the federal pensioners is at least defensible as a way to inoculate the state from the possibility, though by no means certainty, of an even bigger handout ordered by the courts. Spreading the tax goodies to all other retirees was an inexcusable flight from responsibility.
The flight was truly bipartisan. Of the 40 state senators and 100 delegates, a grand total of two - state Sens. Joseph Gartlan, a Democrat, and Warren Barry, a Republican - summoned the courage to vote against the giveaways, to state publicly what many lawmakers reportedly were saying privately.
The package was put together by House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell and other Democratic leaders. But as former GOP legislator Ray L. Garland noted in his weekly column on our Commentary page this past Thursday, the Democrats' effort came in reaction to Republican agitation on the issue.
Still unanswered is why age or retirement status alone should be a qualification for any favorable tax treatment, including tax breaks already in effect before the assembly's recent action to render the rules even more unfair. Bear in mind, the beneficiaries of such tax-relief largess are the well-off among Virginia's seniors, not the elderly poor. Nor, of course, children - who, for the first time in American history, are likelier than the elderly to be living in poverty's shadow.
Of the $340 million due the federal retirees, about $3,000 is to go to Henry Harper, the retired U.S. Agriculture Department veterinarian who was the principal plaintiff in the case that led to the 1989 ruling. He'll probably give the money to "a needy widow," Harper told reporters.
Maybe he should try a needy child instead. They're a lot easier to find.
by CNB