Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 4 · column 6 of 8 · from the scan, no model involved
This being the case, they should consider for a moment the president’s second inaugural address last week and the other statements of fiscal goals and policies which have been coming out of the nation’s capital in recent days. There was, to be sure, much in the speech and in those policies for conservative Virginians to applaud, but they also contain storm warnings for the states as bone-chilling as the weather which gripped Washington on that icy Inauguration Day.
The second Reagan administration is under way amid a cheery windfall of favorable statistics from the nation’s fabled economic indicators. Inflation is down, interest rates are high but more or less steady, the gross national product is soaring and unemployment is declining.
What more could the jubilant Reaganauts ask for as the president’s new term begins?
The only cloud hanging over Mr. Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” as he likes to call the Republic in his rhetorical flourishes, is the gargantuan deficit his administration is running up. This year’s red ink spending will be in the $200 billion range, about three times that in Jimmy Carter’s worst year. And Mr. Reagan, that most conservative of presidents, will have succeeded in doubling the combined national debt incurred by all of his 39 predecessors in just five short years.
But in Virginia, and particularly in Virginia’s government, we care a great deal about balanced books. For years our lawmakers have been required by law to keep the Commonwealth’s spending in the black, and the first of this year that requirement became a part of the State Constitution.
Indeed, we in Virginia have always been more than a bit smug about the way we have handled our public fiscal affairs. Since the memory of our people runneth not to the contrary we have chided the federal government about its profligate ways. Our politicians have built careers out of campaigning against federal spending and solemn pledges to, if elected, carry Virginia’s “sound fiscal thinking” to Washington.
But Mr. Reagan has pledged to do something about the deficit. A sweeping series of econ
95.3%