Fitzsimon File

Transitions are happening everywhere these days.  President-elect Barack Obama is quickly putting his administration together and building support for an economic stimulus package.

Governor-elect Beverly Perdue is meeting with business leaders around the state and members of her team are holding public meetings in Raleigh on education, budget and tax issues, transportation, criminal justice, and mental health.

There’s another transition going on in North Carolina too, one that involves thousands of North Carolinians and should help define the agenda of Perdue and her administration, though it’s not clear from recent statements that they understand it.

Rev. Bill Barrow seems to get it. He works at the Hope Mission in Morehead City and told the Carteret News-Times recently that the group’s emergency shelter is full and that the Mission is now spending three times as much on food to feed the hungry as it did eight months ago.

People are transitioning in North Carolina from homes to homeless shelters, from jobs to the unemployment office, from a decent health care plan paid for by their employer to the ranks of the uninsured, living just a major illness away from bankruptcy or going to see Rev. Barrow about a place to sleep.

A jumpstart for the economy must clearly come from Washington, but Perdue knows that helping create jobs in North Carolina is near the top of the priority list when she takes office in January. At the very top is addressing the state’s budget shortfall without sending more people to homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Elaine Mejia of the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center says the budget deficit comes to $3 billion if lawmakers want to keep state services at current levels and give teachers and state employees a two percent pay raise next year.  State officials don’t want to face that number, but the unlikely event its only $2 billion, it comes to ten percent of the state’s operating budget.

House budget Chair Mickey Michaux said this weekend that the budget can be balanced without raising taxes. House Speaker Joe Hackney made similar comments last week. Perdue said in a recent interview that the state needs to explore shifting more responsibilities to the local level, but cities and counties are cutting their budgets now too.

The comments by Michaux and Hackney are music to the ears of the anti-government zealots. It reinforces their misleading claims that the problem is that state government is bloated and the budget has grown too quickly.

One pundit can’t get over that state spending has grown 40 percent in the state last decade. But the state has grown dramatically too and health care costs have exploded. 

An upcoming report from the Budget and Tax Center will show that when adjusted for inflation General Fund spending per person in North Carolina is the same now as it was 8 years ago. It is also the same as a share of personal income.

State spending is not out of control. And the budget cannot be balanced without new revenue unless lawmakers are willing to deny vital services to thousands of people who need them.

One right-wing think tanker says all it takes is reducing spending on Medicaid and reducing duplication in government. Those Medicaid cuts would mean ending services like prosthetics for people who lose a limb, ambulance service, and prescription drugs.

Ninety percent of the state budget pays for education, human services and criminal justice. And many of those programs need more money in an economic downturn, not less. More people need Medicaid when they lose their job and their health care.  A new report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities shows that poverty increases dramatically during a recession.

Mental health officials acknowledged at a transition meeting Monday that an internal report finds that state institutions need 700 more staff members to adequately take care of patients and some communities still cannot provide services to families who need them.

Governor-elect Perdue and legislators leaders know all that. Their rhetoric doesn’t make sense unless they are willing to let people suffer because they are unwilling to muster the courage to put together a sound, fair budget that combines reasonable budget cuts with progressive tax reform and new revenue.

State officials need to make that case now, or at least keep an open mind until they can listen to what will happen if they cut their way of this budget crisis.

Michaux says lawmakers will have to bite the bullet and make tough decisions. But biting the bullet too hard makes it explode and leaves thousands more people making that troubling transition that Rev. Barrow at the Hope Mission in Morehead City sees every day.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.