The state budget is basically a list of priorities for North Carolina and the budget Governor Beverly Perdue released Thursday makes hers clear—protecting public school classrooms, mental health services and the rest of the state safety net, and investing where she can to create jobs for the thousands of North Carolinians who are looking for work.
And as the economy slowly staggers to its feet, those priorities generally seem like the right ones.
Perdue wants to pay for part of her plan by keeping most of the 2009 temporary sales tax increase in place for two more years, a proposal that the new Republican majorities have repeatedly refused to consider regardless of how many teachers will be fired or how many families will lose vital services instead.
It is easy to disagree with some of the specifics of Perdue’s proposal. For example, evidence shows that cutting corporate taxes does not create that many jobs, but her heart and mind seem to be in the right place.
There is plenty of pain in Perdue’s plan too. Ten thousand positions in state government will be eliminated and as many as 3,000 of them are currently filled. Imagine the headlines if a factory that employed 3,000 people was closing.
The revenue package makes the state’s regressive, antiquated revenue system more regressive and more antiquated by giving corporations a tax cut, while allowing the 2009 temporary income tax surcharge on the wealthy to expire while keeping ¾ of the temporary sales tax increase in place that’s falls disproportionately on the poor
People in the UNC system will feel the budget cuts as much anybody. Perdue wants to slash funding for the universities by $271 million, though some of that will be made up with tuition increases which is not much consolation to families already struggling to send their kids to college.
All that being said, Perdue’s plan is a cautious, but mostly reasonable approach to address the state budget shortfall that is now down to $2.4 billion from $3.7 billion, thanks to rosier revenue projections and savings Perdue has managed to find in the current fiscal year.
The budget not only protects local mental health services, it puts $75 million in the mental health trust fund, which was supposed be an important part of the 2001 reform efforts but never materialized. Perdue also adds $150 million to the state’s savings account and her budget spends 11 percent less per capita than three years ago and spends no one-time money on recurring expenses.
It is a relatively conservative budget, but you’d never know it from the reaction by Republican legislative leaders who responded to Perdue’s plan with their stale and recycled soundbites from the campaign that seem out of place in any meaningful debate about the state’s future.
Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said that Perdue wanted to balance the budget “on the backs of North Carolina taxpayers and local governments.” Berger apparently would rather balance it on the backs of teachers, school nurses, and people with a family member with a mental illness because of an absurd anti-tax pledge Republicans took during the campaign before many of them even understood or considered the consequences.
The vast majority of people in the state don’t want to hear about silly pledges and they don’t want their child’s school dismantled either. Good for Perdue for standing up to the ideologues with a practical plan to balance the budget and protect some of the progress North Carolina has made.
There’s plenty of room for improvement in her budget, but it’s not a bad place to start the discussion.
