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Yet while it has become fashionable to bash Gov. Gerald L. Bailes, the man Mr. Wilder succeeded in office, a few important facts are being overlooked.
The most important is that when Gov. Bailes took office in January of 1986, the state’s economy was roaring likd a blast furnace and tax collections were exceeding even the rosiest forecasts.
Thus monies could be generously doled out for political credit and a historic transportation initiative, funded by massive tax increases, undertaken early on in the Baliles term.
Somewhere between the time Gov. Bailes took his leave and Mr. Wilder became chief executive, the true extent of the state’s economic downturn became publicly apparent.
And so Gov. Wilder, who really had no other choice, could say in his first address to a joint legislative session that the times demanded a conservative fiscal approach that still left room for a social conscience.
Just as Richard Nixon, an old hard-line Communist Basher, could get away with opening new relations with Communist China without bringing the wrath of conservatives down on his head, so could Gov. Wilder slash the budget with only minimal murmurs of protest from the many interest lobbies that had supported his candidacy.
Had a conservative Republican governor presided over this year’s budget process, one suspects that there would have been loud cries of outrage that children, the elderly and everyone of modest means in between were being shortchanged and the state’s critical needs in education, corrections, crime prevention, mental health, transportation and you-name-it were being neglected.
Someone might even have said that the repeal of the state’s 4.5 percent sales tax on non-presription drugs, the crowning surprise achievement of Mr. Wilder’s first two months in office, was less than a sop to irate taxpayers since it will likely result in a net tax savings of only about $5 a year per person when it takes effect in mid-1992, a year and a half from now.
Even so, as Gov. Wilder pointed
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