Memo to Kilgore's handlers: Get the net out! Your boy's about to get off the reservation!
Said the Post further, in covering Kilgore's speech last week to the Peninsula Area Chamber of Commerce:
"Kilgore also said the General Assembly should find a new, permanent source of money for local governments to help them avoid further property tax increases. But he did not say how or when he thought that should happen."
(I've got it, Jerry. How 'bout we lob in a call to the Easter Bunny?)
Or how about this one, a direct quote from the same speech:
"It is mind-boggling that there are some people who think that the immediate needs of government are more immediate than the needs of the people government is meant to serve."
Little unclear on what that means? You can find in Webster's New World Dictionary, Pocket Books, 1995. Look up "gibberish:" (n) unintelligible chatter.
Second Memo to Kilgore's handlers: Hurry!
This is a relatively new phenomenon among Republicans, this "borrow-and-spend" mentality, this retort to the old Democratic "tax-and-spend" slur. Sure, it has been around for a few years here in Virginia -- at least since the Gilmore administration -- but Kilgore has taken it a step further.
Desperate to become relevant in the looming debate on tax reform, the presumptive Republican nominee for the governorship two years hence has apparently given the matter long and hard, thought -- and settled on a mules-can-fly doltism:
We'll borrow our way to freedom from taxes! Why, we'll even borrow ourselves out of debt!
The Associate Press' Bob Lewis, covering the same speech, noted the joined-at-the-hip aspect of Kilgore's proposal and one recently laid down by Speaker of the House Bill Howell.
(I am tempted here to suggest that Howell leading Kilgore through "tax reform" would be like Ray Charles helping Stevie Wonder cross a busy street, but I shall resist that as bow to Virginia decorum.)
Said Lewis: "Like Howell, Kilgore was adamant that the state not take in more money through taxes."
If that sounds like a mutual, almost a sort of non-aggression, "let's be fools together" pact, think again.
Kilgore, according to Christina Nuckols, who covered the speech for the Virginian Pilot, actually said, at one point, "We cannot stick our heads in the sand."
There's a news flash for you.
Ho ... kay. What's that leave? If you're Jerry Kilgore, the answer to that one is easy: whip out the state credit card. Run up the state debt. What's another billion dollars in borrowed money?
(Glad you asked. It amounts to about $135 for every man, woman, and child in Virginia. Or about $350 per household. Add that to government debt -- local, state, and federal -- of nearly $71,000 per household in Virginia, and it doesn't seem like all that much. The fact is, though, that Kilgore is proposing a 15 percent increase in state-backed borrowing. The interest alone on that would be $80-100 million a year.)
You just know what he must be thinking: 'By the time Virginia taxpayers figure out what has happened, by the time those bills hit the mailboxes, we'll be long gone anyway.'
Sensing, maybe even anticipating, trouble, or perhaps just covering his bets, Kilgore spokesman Tim Murtaugh, who surely has the toughest job in Virginia these days, rushed to "explain" the attorney general.
Said the Post: "Kilgore spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the attorney general would wait for the expected economic turnaround before calling for more borrowing, but leaders should start talking about it now."
Good suggestion, Timbo. It seems to be working.
Copyright 2003