Fitzsimon File

The artist formerly and once again known as Prince would be proud. State Treasurer Richard Moore and Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue are campaigning like its 1999. Moore’s latest commercial attacks Perdue for the 1998-1999 state budget she negotiated and supported as Senate Appropriations Chair.

The ad says Perdue “gave tax cuts to the wealthy, pushed spending out of control, creating a billion dollar budget disaster.” An analysis by the Charlotte Observer points out that laying all that on Perdue is quite a stretch, though it is true that she voted for a budget that cut the inheritance tax and increased spending.

But the budget also ended the regressive state sales tax on food and gave teachers a 6.5 percent pay increase as part of a plan to raise teacher pay to the national average. The N.C. Budget Tax Center’s analysis showed that more than 80 percent of the billion dollar budget increase was spent on salary increases, education, and construction projects.

It is not the first time the budget passed by state lawmakers in 1998 has been the subject of a political attack in a governor’s race.

In his 2004 reelection campaign, Governor Mike Easley attacked Republican challenger Patrick Ballantine for his support of the 1998 budget too, claiming that the “big spending” was the cause of the state’s budget problems in 2001.  

It appears that the 1998 budget is the source of all evil, with Perdue and Ballantine primarily to blame. Moore’s ad says that “leading Democrats” called the budget irresponsible.  Easley said in 2004 that Ballantine ran the state’s “credit card up” with his support of the spending plan.

Neither Moore’s ad now nor Easley’s claim four years ago mentioned that the final budget passed the Senate unanimously in 1998 and with only one dissenting vote in the House. Leading Democrats may have criticized the budget, but every Democrat in the General Assembly voted for it.

So did all but one Republican, which the right-wing think tanks always leave out of their frequent attacks on Democrats for spending too much money in the late 1990s.  Also often forgotten is that Republicans controlled the House from 1995-1999 and were just as responsible for legislation as the Democrats who controlled the Senate.

When the 1998 session adjourned in late October, it marked the end of the longest session in state history at that point. The session was held up for months by sharp disagreement over welfare reform and which taxes to cut.

Lawmakers also responded to scandals at the Department of Transportation that year, which sounds awfully familiar, by reducing the size of the DOT Board and allegedly requiring Board members to disclose their fundraising activities, though that provision was rendered useless by an interpretation from the Easley Administration.  

But the budget defined the 1998 session and is still the source of political accusations of almost every variety. The truth is that the most of the spending that year was justified and ending the food tax was long overdue.

The full effect of cutting the inheritance tax wasn’t felt until two years later, adding to budget crisis that lawmakers responded to with cuts to education and human service programs.

But the 1998 spending didn’t cause the 2001 fiscal crisis alone. Lawmakers, including Perdue, didn’t have to cut the state inheritance tax, and pointing out her support of the reduction is legitimate. And the General Assembly could have avoided deep cuts in 2001 by raising more revenue instead of slashing human service budgets.

The whole episode points out again that candidates with long legislative records have a lot to explain and defend. Campaign ads almost never provide context to muddy up an attack. That doesn’t mean the attack is entirely unwarranted. It means the truth is more complicated and doesn’t fit well into a 30-second commercial.

The current flap over the 1998 budget, much like Easley’s attacks in the 2004 race, is most troubling because it reinforces the misperception that lawmakers always spend too much money, that the state budget is out of control.

Wonder if the teachers who finally got a decent raise that year agree? Or the elderly and disabled people across the state who have access to Medicaid services that the budget expanded, or the single mothers who could go back to work because of help with a child care subsidy.  They never seem to come up in all the talk about the 1998 budget, that for some reason continues to this day. 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.