Fitzsimon File

While the battle to be the next Speaker of the House rages on behind the scenes, there is some reasonably good news coming from the Legislative Building these days.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the high-powered study commission looking at tax reform, Senator David Hoyle expressed strong support for an earned income tax credit, which has long been high on the agenda of progressive groups working for a less regressive tax system in the state.

Hoyle has traditionally been a champion of lower taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals, not the poor. It may be that his newfound enthusiasm for an EITC is part a plan to present a package of legislation that also includes tax cuts for business this session.

For some reason, some lawmakers can’t seem to bring themselves to support measures to directly help the working poor without “balancing” them with tax reductions for corporations or the wealthy. The reverse is almost never true. Lawmakers routinely approve business tax breaks without any corresponding relief for folks struggling to make ends meet.

Nevertheless, Hoyle’s support is noteworthy and could be the start of a meaningful debate about tax policy this session.

Also encouraging were the recommendations of the House Select Committee on Health Care Wednesday. The committee is proposing that lawmakers ban smoking in public places across the state, provide health care for more uninsured children, and establish a high-risk insurance pool to allow people with serious illness to purchase basic coverage, though at much higher premiums.

The House passed high-risk pool legislation last session, but the Senate declined to consider it.

Nome of these recommendations will solve the health care crisis in North Carolina, but each one is a significant step in the right direction.  The smoking ban continues to gain support across the state from local governments and the public at large, according to recent polls.

The message has finally through that secondhand smoke can kill you. It seems like an easy call to ban it in places where people gather. Studies show it will save lives and millions of dollars in health care costs.

The committee’s recomendation to expand health care for children is also important, though falls short of one proposal to expand Health Choice, the current health care program for poor children, to the families of the children who are eligible. It is still easier to sell  expanding human services for children in North Carolina. The children deserve it, but if we really want to help poor children, we also ought to make sure we help their families too.

Finally, the high-risk insurance pool seems like the biggest no-brainer of all, simply providing a way for the chronically ill to access insurance, even if it is at sharply higher rates than the general population.

One of Raleigh’s radical right wing institutions labeled last year’s proposal a version of socialism, always the complaint from the free market fundamentalists. The truth is the plan would help roughly 9,000 people who currently have no chance of being able to buy health care coverage.

Tax relief for the working poor, insurance for more children and chronically ill adults, and healthier workplaces. All encouraging signs from Jones Street, even if they are just recommendations or policy statements from legislative leaders. Let’s hope the sentiments continue as the agenda is shaped for the 2007 session.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.