THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 11, 1995 TAG: 9501110432
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
The question for the Virginia General Assembly, convening today, is whether it will challenge Gov. George F. Allen's program that, unchanged, could break the fiscal back of the commonwealth.
It is so radical as to make a mockery of Virginia's code of pay as you go. If old Harry Byrd Sr., father of conservatism, came back and saw it, he'd drop dead.
It shows so little comprehension of Virginia government as to suggest that Allen relied on Martians for advice. You think not? Look.
As legislators arrive in Richmond, Virginia faces a budget shortfall of $300 million.
Under rising school enrollments, it may reach $750 million by 1998.
In the face of that staggering sum, most of us would be grateful to escape without a tax increase.
Allen proposes a tax reduction. It would afford the average family of four a tax break that grows from about $46 the first year to about $368 by the year 2000.
To fund it, Allen would gut services. The proposed slashes of $403million would be so hurtful as to wreak havoc statewide.
His budget would cut by a third the fund for extension agents.
Working through Virginia Tech and Virginia State, they alert farmers to new technology for improving agriculture, including new strains and ways to increase yields.
The cuts would put the program in a tailspin from which it might never recover. Spiraling down with it would be the 4-H Clubs of 100,000 youths who learn staunch family values as well as farming.
In that dreadful slash, as with so many others, one may sense anti-intellectualism that, whether by design or ignorance, would consign Virginia to the backwater of states.
It would cut by $1.6 million the eminent scholars fund that, aided by private donors, brings outstanding teachers to Virginia colleges.
It would reduce by 30 percent the funds for staffing the State Council of Higher Education, which coordinates colleges and universities to get the most brains for the buck.
Among disastrous cuts in elementary schools, it deletes $10.5 million aimed at preventing dropouts. With its share, Norfolk reduced the rate of dropouts from 15 percent to nearly 6 percent.
It would cut in half the funding for five public TV stations to which parents turn for shows that enlighten rather than pollute the minds of children. It would eliminate all state aid to public radio.
Dozens of other cuts are as deleterious.
Some Republicans exult that if Democrats don't back the tax cut, the GOP can use that club to beat them in next year's election and gain a majority of seats. With their present bent, that is a sobering prospect.
The Republicans' founding father, Ted Dalton, pioneered by pledging to do what was best for Virginia. To replace that noble goal with raw partisanship would be ill-advised. A thousand speakers turned out at half a dozen budget hearings to protest the proposed cuts. If the GOP persists, it may force an increasing horde of Virginians to become Yellow Dog Democrats.
In the old days, that was one who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote Republican.
That, indeed, would be a pity. by CNB