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By JOHN GOOLRICK
Rappahannock Newt Special Writer
Harry Parrish of Manassas is a veteran Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates and a former local official.
And if there’s one thing Del. Parrish has learned in all his years of service it’s that hardly anybody likes tax increases or government spending reductions.
“It’s just human nature,” Del. Parrish told a group recently. “People want more from government and expect more, but they don’t want to have to pay more to get it.”
What Del. Parrish is talking about is becoming painfully obvious as the realization sinks in that Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder is as serious as a heart attack about balancing the state’s biennial budget now out of whack an estimated $1.4 billion.
When Gov. Wilder released his laundry list of reductions, accompanied by an admonition to local governments not to raise taxes, there were no loud cries of outrage, but muted expressions of suffering abounded.
The Governor’s actions will in time dig into the pocketbooks of nearly every state employee, cut back spending on education, corrections, health care and mental health and will impact on localities by providing them less state assistance than they’d counted on.
Facing by far the biggest revenue shortfall in the state’s history, Gov. Wflder diverted from himself any thunder from the right by a display of fiscal conservatism that is probably unparalled in state history.
Republicans seizing on the shortfall as a potential campaign issue next year said that Mr. Wader’s predecessor, Gerald Bahles, had been gudty of a fiscal cover-up and that some of the mess was caused by
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