THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411040015
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
Our Hampton Roads congressmen have served us well and should be re-elected. They've defended our military bases and gotten an aircraft carrier for Newport News Shipbuilding. If Ollie North is elected, kiss off Naval Air Station Oceana.
Business honors productive employees with retention; so should voters reward productive elected officials.
All Hampton Roads' congressmen are fiscal conservatives with substantial track records.
Patriotic Americans should read Reagan-first-term Budget Director David A. Stockman's The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. Stockman begged Reagan to balance his budget request to Congress by cutting entitlements to accompany Reagan's drastic tax cuts and heavy Defense-appropriation requests. Congress didn't appropriate as much as Reagan asked for, but Reagan's continuation of Reaganomics through 1992 quadrupled the national debt so that now each American family owes more than $73,200.
True, Reagan's policies increased jobs and tax income, but not enough to balance federal expenditures. Our national debt ballooned. Stockman says the GOP joined Democrats in ratifying a half-trillion-dollar-per-year welfare state. The GOP helped build it brick by brick.
``The GOP and the president should not have told the American electorate in 1984 that we don't have to raise taxes,'' Stockman wrote. ``It wasn't true.''
Our 1994 deficit estimate is $202 billion. This is equal to the interest payment on Reagan's debt and more than net expenditures for all the federal government save entitlements and Defense.
Patriots must tell our politicians that we see the gravity of America's financial mismanagement. Politicians' ``pie in the sky'' promises must be met with well-deserved contempt. We cannot leave this mess for our children and grandchildren to clean up. Our generation piled it up by placing our faith in snake-oil salesmen.
DOUGLAS S. MURRAY
Virginia Beach, Nov. 1, 1994 by CNB