It is pretty easy to tell that the General Assembly session is just around the corner. Requests for state funding are everywhere, most of them needed and all of them adding to the inescapable conclusion that this will be a frustrating summer, with the hope of legislative leaders for a short, narrowly focused session on a certain collision course with public demands for lawmakers to address pressing problems, mental health, the probation and parole system, and the struggles of poor kids in school.
Leaders of both the university and community college systems weighed in this week with their wish lists and the Mental Health Oversight Committee approved a series of recommendations for the General Assembly that includes policy changes in the beleaguered mental health system and more money for state hospitals and community services.
As John Quinterno of the N.C. Budget Tax Center reports on the Progressive Pulse, UNC President Erskine Bowles wants legislators to come up with $340 million more for the university system, much of it for faculty salary increases. That does not include another $722 million in requests for construction projects.
Community College President Scott Ralls wants $146 million in new funding for the system he heads, and a large part of his request is for salary hikes too. But as Quinterno points out, Bowles' request for $340 million is by itself more than lawmakers will have to spend this summer unless they make cuts to existing programs or ignore basic needs like increased enrollment in public schools and a raise for state workers.
Members of the Mental Health Oversight Committee voted to ask for almost $60 million in new funding, primarily to address the ongoing crisis in the state's mental hospitals. The committee also wants to make some significant policy changes too.
More about them in a future Fitzsimon File, one proposal would prohibit Health and Human Services Secretary Dempsey Benton from consolidating the management functions of the 25 local agencies that now oversee services across the state until January 1, 2009, close to when Benton leaves his job unless the next governor reappointments him.
There are other study commissions that will ask for funding, most notably the 21st Century Transportation Committee, (Stephen Jackson has the latest on those deliberations on the Progressive Pulse), and that does not include the calls for more money for the probation and parole system that is under fire as a result of the murder of UNC Student Body President Eve Carson.
As you read here last week, the news about state revenues is not promising, even from the most optimistic forecasters, leaving legislative leaders with a difficult choice when the session convenes May 13.
Do what they can with the little money available and get out of town, or find the political courage to raise more revenue to take care of the mentally ill, provide more affordable housing and invest in programs that keep people out of prison and help inmates when they are released. A good place to start would be to pass combined reporting for businesses, to stop corporations from shifting profits around to avoid paying state taxes.
The week also brought another example of the soundbite-friendly anti-tax rhetoric that lawmakers are up against this election year, the misleading announcement of tax freedom day by the right-wing Tax Foundation.
The group says that April 23 marks the day that Americans will start working for themselves and stop working just to pay federal, state and local taxes. The Foundation calculates tax freedom day for every state and says North Carolina's was April 17, ranking it 27th in the nation, a fact gleefully trumpeted by the right-wing host of the afternoon drive program on Curtis Media's flagship station in Raleigh Thursday, as part of his daily anti-government rant.
Tax freedom day is reported every year by media outlets across the country and in North Carolina, much to the delight of the market fundamentalists. But the way the Tax Foundation comes up with the day is flawed and as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, many news reports inaccurately present the findings as representative of the average worker's tax bill.
The Center cites the Tax Foundation's own report on its methodology that reveals that the calculation is the "average tax burden for the economy as a whole, rather than for specific subgroups of taxpayers." All but the top fifth of federal taxpayers pay significantly less than the rate the Foundation uses to figure out its freedom day that is so often reported uncritically.
Too bad we can't have a misleading-rhetoric-free day about taxes. Maybe then lawmakers would be more likely to find the political courage to raise the revenue to begin to address the state's problems. Maybe they will muster it anyway. It's ok to dream.
