Reasons to vote for George Allen


Virginia Democrats have a long history of reckless spending; George Allen
has a long history of opposing them. That's what this US Senate election is
basically about and why democrats have made Allen a major target.

The ways in which ordinary people are harmed and impoverished by democrat
policies are often less than clear or obvious; they take the form of higher
taxes at all levels of government and, more often than not, the money piled
up by these higher taxes is used for purposes which benefit nobody other
than beaurocrats seeking to aggrandize power.

Homeowners see rising local taxes directly; people living in apartments see
them in the form of rent increases. George Allen is generally associated
with populist groups within the Republican party and has been an ally of
Ted and Marcy Dykes, who have led some of the hardest battles against those
who would spend Virginia into a Kafkaesque beaurocratic state.

Comprehending the problem requires just a little bit of a course in the
recent financial history of Fairfax County.

In theory, when real estate values rise, governments are morally obligated
to lower the rates of taxation correspondingly so that nobodys taxes rise
faster than inflation rates; nonetheless, this rule is not written down
anyweere and the Fairfax County government has rarely obeyed it. Other
regional governments of course look to Fairfax County as a model for their
own behavior.

Beginning in 1986 or so and lasting until around 1990 or 1991, Fairfax
county experienced a gigantic rise in assessed housing values. Again, the
county government should have simply lowered tax rates accordingly, so that
nobody's taxes would have risen any faster than inflation at the outside;
They didn't. You might think that the human mind simply couldn't invent
ways to spend money as fast as it began to roll in under such
circumstances, and you'd be wrong, particularly under the reign of Audrey
Moore. Expenditure items began to include such things as decorative
windmills from Holland to provide scenic atmosphere for highway
cloverleafs, parks which nobody needed or wanted, a fleet of police
cruisers purchased before they were needed and left sit to rot, and on and
on until it finally dawned on them that what they REALLY needed was an
imperial palace, like Peterhof or Versaille. That is what the
so-called "Taj Mahol", or "Fairfax County Imperial Palace" behind the
FairOaks mall is about.

By 1988, it was obvious that the board of supervisers, along with the county
executive, Jay Hamilton Lambert, was totally out of control. Taxes in some
areas had been going up 100% and more a year, and people were actually
losing their homes and going without heat on account of it. A sort of a
non-meeting of the minds took place at the grange in Great Falls. Ted Dykes
and other civic leaders spoke and then, predictably, the local press showed
up to cover the speeches of Lambert and Drainesville superviser Lilla
Richards. The people had had enough of such treatment; the press was told
they could leave immediately, or cover their cameras until time for
rebuttals. Things grew stranger as the evening wore on. Richards told the
people in attendance they needed a "civics lesson" and, by some accounts,
Richards and Lambert were lucky to leave alive; the police escort helped.

The two Dykes' organized COST (Committee on Sensible Taxation), and rounded
up something like 4000 names on a petition to put the so-called COST
proposal on the 89 ballot as a referendum to change the form of the county
government and summarily heave the then present board in its entirety,
prematurely. The law stated that this coule be done, and that either 3000
names or 10% of registered voters names on a petition were required. The
obvious intent of the language was 3000 or 10%, whichever was LESS, i.e. so
that some little county with 2000 living souls including dogs, cats, and
children would not require 3000 registered voters' names on a petition.

Mary Sue Terry in her role as Attorney General, however, insisted the law
meant 3000 or 10%, whichever was MORE, and this meant rounding up 40,000
names, which Fairfax County didn't even have the manpower or facilities to
verify or count. Nonetheless, we did it, and handed them nearly 50,000
names on a petition. Naturally enough, they found grounds to toss out
something like 11,000 of these names and, when the Dykes offered to have an
extra 5000 or so names in on the same day, told them that that could not be
done, and they'd have to start over.

When it appeared that this was indeed still possible, Terry and cohorts
rammed through a special law for Fairfax county, SB 278, which forbade
counties over a certain size (only Fairfax qualifies) to hold special
elections involving any change in the forms of county government. Every
other county in Va. has this right; Fairfax now does not.

Thus, by changing the rules in the middle of the game a number of times, the
powers that be in Fairfax County, along with their politically correct
cohorts in Richmond were able to keep the COST petition off the ballot in
89 and preserve the status quo for two more years.

What WAS on that ballot was a referendum on "pledge" bonds, basically a
government request for a blank check from the people. This was another kind
of a phony municipal bond scheme; the pols figured what the hell, all they
can do is say no, which they did, something like 80 - 20. The funny thing
is that the Washington Post and nearly every common element of local media
had been telling Virginians they HAD to vote for this item if they wished
to continue to lead civilized lives. The item on the ballot called for
voters to surrender their right to pass judgment on bond issues in
perpetuity.

The war against phony bonds continued to occupy much of COST's attention
afterwards, including two lawsuits, one involving the B2/B3 complex. Marcy
Dykes won the first of these by a 6 - 1 vote of the Va. supreme court, and
it is at that point that the entire business gets interesting and ceases to
be only a Fairfax County deal. The boys in Richmond paniced when that
happened; in ruling for Dykes case in Fairfax, the court had said that
something like half the debt which the state govt. had contracted over the
last 10 years or so was basically illegal.

Terry and a whole gang of the heavy hitters from Richmond somehow persuaded
the court to reverse itself WITHOUT ANY NEW EVIDENCE BEING PRESENTED. This
is illegal. The court is only allowed to reverse such a decision on grounds
of overwhelming new evidence, or when forced to reverse itself by the US
supreme court. In ruling against Dykes' and others on the B2/B3 suit, the
judge cited this former case as a precident, basically claiming "You lost
something similar two years ago, and therefore you deserve to lose now!"
The B2/B3 case, as I see it, involved a violation of fiduciary
responsibilities on the part of the board; such a precident should have
been irrelevant.

In all of these dealings, Virginia Democrats have behaved as if they aspired
to become an autocratic or monarchical ruling class of sorts, and as if
they believed they had some sort of a devine right to rule, and that it did
not matter what they had to do to accomplish this.

Again, George Allen has always been an ally of populists like Ted and Marcy
Dykes, and of the common man in Virginia, and the people who are most
committed to his removal are the same people who want to tax us into
destitution and slavery in order to buy more imperial palaces, more
decorative windmills for highway cloverleafs, and more fleets of unneeded
government vehicles.
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