THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 21, 1994 TAG: 9412210006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Gov. George Allen was elected on a promise to cut taxes by billions and erect prisons costing hundreds of millions. He has stepped closer to delivering on that promise with his proposed budget for 1994-1996. Fiscal reality dictates that many programs must be curtailed to balance the state's budget.
So a moment of truth has arrived for Virginians. Do we really want the results that Allen's budget logic will produce? We want lower state taxes. This budget will lower the tax by raising the personal exemption from $800 to $2,400. Thousands of the working poor will pay no income tax.
The state will incur almost a half billion in debt for the promised prison-building program. On the other hand, there will be cuts. The latest round of job reductions will remove 1,100 of 110,000 public employees from the payroll. If the recommendations of Allen's government-reform panel are followed, another 14,000 will follow before he leaves office in 1998.
Remaining public employees will be permitted modest pay increases, but no new money will be available for the purpose; raises will have to be funded by cuts in each department's budget.
Most state colleges and universities will get less money. Public-school programs for dropout prevention, homework assistance and English as a second language will go. So will housing programs for the poor. Offices devoted to social services, health and mental health will be streamlined - a euphemism for cut.
In Hampton Roads, proposed cuts would halt the partly-built Norfolk campus of the Tidewater Community College. State funding would be eliminated for public radio and William and Mary's Institute for Bill of Rights Law. Funding would be cut for public TV, the Chrysler Museum, the Virginia Air and Space Museum and so on.
All of these cuts are minor - $1 million here, $5 million there - compared with putative savings of $135 million in Medicaid outlays. This huge program has been growing rapidly and now costs taxpayers an astonishing $1 billion a year, but now the rate of growth appears to be slowing.
A federal forecast taking that slowdown into account and an increase in federal funding portends $90 million less in state spending for Medicaid over the next two years than had earlier been projected. Other savings would theoretically come from phasing in managed care, reducing in-patient stays and paying less for prescription drugs. Poor patients would be subjected to the same constraints now applicable to privately insured patients.
Of course, the Republican revolution in Washington may introduce changes in the vast bureaucratic tangle of Medicaid that will have expensive consequences at the state level and upset these assumptions. For the moment, however, Allen's calculations seem largely devoid of smoke and mirrors. And his tough budgeting has cut not only programs anathema to conservatives, like public broadcasting, but some money for prison guards and law enforcement.
In effect, Allen has thrown down the gauntlet to legislators - mainly Democrats, though the proposed cuts have made even some in his own party queasy. But the governor has done what he has good reason to believe he was elected to do. He has dared legislators to say him nay. The session begins Jan. 11. A budget will have to be voted on within two months. And every legislator must face the voters in November.
Special interests will come out of the woodwork. Public meetings will solicit voter sentiment. The political cross currents will be treacherous. In short, the new year will offer a heady dose of democracy in action. Virginians need to decide the sort of state they want to inhabit and let their voices be heard. by CNB