Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501230082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
Republican Randy Forbes of Chesapeake and Democrat Thomas Jackson of Hillsville are up-and-coming lawmakers on opposite sides of the General Assembly session's pivotal debate: whether to cut taxes and government spending.
That issue could decide the outcome of next year's assembly elections and the balance of legislative power for years to come.
But Forbes and Jackson say what's at stake for them is principle, not politics. They remind Virginians that behind all the political shenanigans lie competing visions of what government should do.
One view will prevail. The question is whose.
\ Jackson's opposition to Gov. George Allen's tax-cut plan was forged two years ago when he accompanied a group of high school students from rural Wythe County to populous Northern Virginia.
"It broke my heart to go up there and see what we didn't have," recalled Jackson, a dairy farmer's son, former high school basketball standout, lawyer-legislator and advocate for the children of Southwest Virginia.
Jackson came back to Richmond last session determined to balance the scales. He helped win extra funding for the state's neediest schools, including his - money that's now on the cutting board.
As a fourth-term Democrat in a district that strongly supported Republican Oliver North's U.S. Senate bid last year and Allen's election in 1993, Jackson knows his safest political move might be to vote for some kind of tax relief.
He arrived in Richmond hoping to do just that. Now he's changed his mind.
"After 10 days of looking through the budget, it's clearly an either-or situation," he said. "Only in Lake Wobegon can we have the best schools in the country and tax breaks and all the citizens cared for."
The reference to Garrison Keillor is telling. Like the public radio figure, the 37-year-old Jackson projects a self-deprecating, small-town wholesomeness. As a junior member of the House Appropriations Committee, he asks adversarial questions - but politely. And when his name popped up in a less-than-flattering way on the conservative editorial page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week (to some, a sure sign of a Democrat's arrival), Jackson was stung.
"I don't have as tough a skin as some," he admitted as he sat in his House office, long legs stretched before him, his finger twiddling a rubber band. "But I'll get there by virtue of believing in what I'm doing."
Jackson's opposition to the tax cuts hardened a few days ago when he saw a locality-by-locality analysis of how much money could be lost from school budgets. While Allen's plan would give almost every school system more money when a new budget year begins in July, it also would give many a lot less than already had been allotted for 1996.
Among those that would lose most are urban districts and some of the rural counties that Jackson worked to help. Buchanan County in the far southwest would lose $68 per pupil, for instance, while suburban Fairfax County in Northern Virginia would lose $6 per pupil.
"The Southwest's getting massacred," Jackson warned at a money committee hearing this week.
Look at it this way, he said: A family in his district filing an $18,000 tax return would get a $23 income tax break under Allen's plan to increase personal exemptions. But Wythe County is losing $20 per pupil in the budget. If the family has two children, that's a net loss of $17.
"I don't think we can pull back from the programs and educational opportunities our young people need to develop to their fullest potential, while putting our first priority in prisons or tax cuts," Jackson said.
Will his conservative district agree? "I don't know," said Jackson.
But he recalls what his 87-year-old father told him when he was first elected. Jackson has since framed the message and hung it on a wall at home: "If you ever get to the point that being elected means more than doing what's right, then you should retire."
\ As a boy growing up in Great Bridge, Forbes watched his father solve problems. Whether a neighboring family needed help paying an electric bill or a teen-ager was setting his sights on college, insurance salesman Malcolm Forbes had a way of helping them find a means to their end.
The lesson took. Today, as a 42-year-old, third-term delegate from Chesapeake, Forbes believes most problems are best tackled by people helping people. Government per se is not evil, but too much of it can be, he says.
It is a philosophy that is tailor-made for Forbes' pivotal role in pushing Allen's tax and budget proposals. As GOP floor leader in the House of Delegates, Forbes must monitor debate and the progress of bills there.
Last week he assigned himself the task of answering a growing chorus of Democratic complaints about Allen's tax ideas. "If we cannot unite," he said on the House floor, "let us divide on the issue of whether we are overtaxed or undertaxed."
Meticulously pressed and tailored, Eagle Scout courteous, committed to the ideological revolution that U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich represents, Forbes appears at first glance to be cut from a mold of young party leaders on the rise.
But he brings his own twist to the equation. He is at heart a policy wonk, one who likes to look for areas of compromise in the facts and figures beneath the surface of a political issue, and one with a particularly soft spot for kids. He and wife, Shirley, have four children. Their local extended family - counting nieces and nephews - is about 45 people strong.
"Our house is sort of the focal point for our family," said Forbes, whose office is in his childhood home and whose sprawling house is about 50 yards away. Whether the issue is new wallpaper or a wedding reception, members of the clan often wind up at the Forbeses' for a powwow.
Forbes acknowledges that he quibbles with some of Allen's budget proposals, particularly as they relate to education. But he argues that the overlying thrust of the governor's ideas is sound.
"Over the last decades in Virginia and nationally, the way we've responded to various concerns is by putting another layer of government on another layer of government," he said. "We're all in agreement that this big ship of government is going in the wrong direction. The question is how fast we turn it around."
Forbes said several misconceptions are permeating the budget debate.
One is that Allen has cut education spending. In fact, he said, while most localities would get less in 1996 than they were expecting, they'll still get more than they did in 1995.
Another is that all $403 million in next year's proposed budget reductions stem from Allen's plan to cut taxes. In fact, Allen's plan to cut income taxes and a gross receipts tax on businesses would cost $149 million in 1996. Some other cuts are helping pay for Allen initiatives.
But without either, the legislature would have to cut the budget to pay for a federal retirees settlement and a shortfall in prison space, he said.
In the upcoming debate, Forbes said, he hopes partisan rhetoric will give way to a search for compromise and sound solutions. His father's insistance on individual responsibility should be the sort of principle on which Democrats and Republicans find common ground, Forbes said.
"He believed you need to put something back in the community. We'd have people call at any time of the day or night; Daddy always believed you helped them."
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB