Weekly Briefing

North Carolina needs a bigger (and leaner) state budget

With the General Assembly poised to complete its work on the 2008-'09 budget this week and the Easley administration entering its final months, now is a good time to begin to consider what state policymakers have wrought, what might have been, and what we all should be working toward in years to come.

The obvious conclusion: North Carolina needs more and less state government.

Now, before you conclude that a certain writer has become lightheaded after spending too many hours listening to convoluted policy debates and breathing the overcooled air in the state Legislative Building, read on. The prescription is not as schizophrenic as it might seem.  

We need more…

As my colleague Chris Fitzsimon has pointed out on several occasions in recent weeks, this year's budget bill is, by most measures, an extremely modest and politically safe package. Cowed by a soft economy, diminished tax revenues and the threat of pandering TV ads in the fall, legislative leaders shied away from any broad new initiatives that would have required significant new revenue. Even the relatively tiny bump in "sin" taxes that the Governor proposed prior to the session was a non-starter.

In general, lawmakers took the position that providing small pay raises to state employees, covering enrollment growth in education and providing for some modest adjustments and supplements in other areas of need (home foreclosures, children's health, dropout prevention, pre-school) was all they could muster.

And they were probably right - from a narrow, short-term, political perspective. But to claim with a straight face that the proposed budget comes even close to meeting all of North Carolina's myriad needs for basic public services is utterly preposterous.

As even a cursory look at the lives of the nine-plus million people who call North Carolina home makes immediately clear, our state is in desperate need of a lot more than modest adjustments and supplements. Consider the following facts that the budget will scarcely impact:

• At least 1.3 million people are living below the pathetically low, "official" poverty line - including one in five children,
• At least 1.5 million people lack health insurance - including nearly a fifth of the 18-64 population.
• Nearly a third of our high school students are failing to graduate.
• Nearly 30,000 eligible low-income children are on the official waiting list for childcare.
• As many as two-million people reside in substandard or unaffordable housing.
• Poor and middle income North Carolinians pay significantly higher percentages of their incomes in state and local taxes combined than do their wealthy fellow citizens.

These are just a few of dozens of serious crises that afflict our state. These are big and fundamental problems that have a huge impact on who we are and who we will become as a people. Unfortunately, most of us look right past them. Like the middle and upper class residents of Third World countries who have become numb to the spectacle of children begging in the street, we imagine that someone else is dealing with these problems when we're not looking or that, in accord with conservative dogma, "the poor will always be with us" and that nothing really can be done.

But, again, as the facts continue to show, something can and must be done. Whether it's health care, public education, childcare, affordable housing, juvenile justice or poverty itself, we know that public services and progressive tax policies work. Such programs may not always be perfect or perfectly efficient, but when applied in a sustained and broad-based way, they have, throughout American history, dramatically improved the lives of tens of millions of people and the overall health of our communities. From Social Security to public education to public health insurance to mass transit, when adequately funded and supported, public programs make life better for everyone.

The key, of course, is in providing adequate funding and support. North Carolina will never fulfill the demands of the Supreme Court's Leandro mandate, dramatically reduce school dropouts or assure universal health and child care with a only few million dollars here and a new task force there (much less through some kind of misguided plan to throw up our hands and turn things over to the "free market"). To build the kind of truly decent, humane and progress-oriented state that North Carolina ought to become, lawmakers will need to muster the courage to commit billions of additional dollars to core public services and to raise much of that money from the people and businesses at the top of the heap who have disproportionately profited most from the current inequitable system.

This will not be a modest or politically safe budget, but a radically ambitious budget that will require vision and courage and a thick-skinned willingness to do what's right for the long haul. The state is obviously not there yet.

But we also need less…

But, of course, one of the greatest challenges for progressives when it comes to building support for the kind of public budgets (and public services) that are truly necessary is what to do about corruption and waste. Too often, those who would defend government and the cause of expanding public services find themselves painted into a corner by the phenomenon of public officials who squander public resources. How can one be for expanding public services at the same time that large amounts of current spending are frittered away, controlled by officious bureaucrats, or worse yet, pocketed by corrupt officials?  

The answer is twofold.

First, it must be pointed out that while waste is always a significant problem in any large human enterprise - public or private - its impact is almost always greater from a symbolic viewpoint than in the real world. For every thousand dollars siphoned off by a corrupt state legislator's would-be nonprofit or a luxury trade junket, the state spends millions on legitimate and essential public services (education, roads, public safety) that do enormous good for society as a whole. This is a message that progressives must continue to deliver regularly and forcefully. A few rotten apples do not ruin the entire barrel.

This is not in any way, however, to diminish or excuse waste, corruption and otherwise questionable spending. To the contrary, progressives should be even more vigilant than their conservative adversaries when it comes to exposing wasteful public spending. Just, for instance, because a right-wing group exposes a questionable salary hike for the Governor's spouse or an economic development plan that's run amok is no reason for progressives to rise to government's defense in a knee jerk fashion. When the facts warrant, we should join with the effort to expose and decry such abuses of the public trust - even if the other side's motives are not so pure.

Indeed, if progressives are serious about building the kind of public infrastructure truly needed to undergird a successful 21^st Century society, it will be essential that they champion efficiency and a renewed commitment to weed out waste and corruption - through better budgeting practices, more frequent audits and higher performance standards.

The trick is to fight waste and corruption without losing one's perspective or allowing the far right to cloud everyone else's. Enhanced efficiency is an essential lynchpin to a larger, more effective state government. But, the mere existence of corruption and waste is no reason to force well-meaning officials to become mired in interminable red tape or to undermine the mission of government as a whole. 

Going forward

In short, if North Carolina is going to thrive in the decades to come, it's essential that we have more and less: more good government capable of solving the problems that confront us as a society and less bad government that undermines such a cause. Progressive should not shy away from fighting either battle.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Weekly Briefing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.