Fitzsimon File

A list not to be on

Newspapers across the state have been documenting the effects of proposed budget cuts in their communities, with most of the focus on what they would mean for the local schools.  A report in the Gaston Gazette recently featured a new twist along with the usual reactions by school officials and local legislators.

The story included a link to a database listing the name of every teacher in line to be laid off, searchable by school and position.

Talk about a list you don't want to be on.

Lower taxes than a low-tax state

The folks over in Lockeland are beside themselves about the discussion in the General Assembly about raising new revenue to help balance the budget, still insisting that lawmakers can simply cut their way out of a $4.6 billion hole without damaging public schools or human services.

One Locker recently noted that a U.S. News and World Report story listed Virginia among the five best states to start a business and pointed out that the magazine says that Virginia is known for its low taxes. 

Odd that the Locker didn't check with the Tax Foundation, the think tank they cite so often in their misleading critiques of North Carolina's tax system.

The Foundation's latest ratings of state tax burdens, (their word of course) released last year for fiscal year 2008, found that Virginia had the 18^th highest overall taxes in the country. North Carolina ranked 20^th, with lower taxes than Virginia.

If U.S. News says that Virginia is known for its low taxes and North Carolina taxes are lower, then the Lockers don't seem to have much of a point in the comparison. But when it comes to anti-tax rhetoric, facts are rarely welcome.

Budget cuts they forgot they believe in

Speaking of the Lockers, many of them seem to have bought into the theory popular with other market fundamentalists and ideologues that House budget writers intentionally proposed the most egregious budget cuts they could find to build support for raising taxes.

Folks on the Right insist that their view that the budget should be balanced with cuts alone doesn't mean they support the cuts originally proposed in the House plan. There are apparently other places to get a couple of billion dollars, though they haven't yet identified them.

As for the grassy knoll budget conspiracy theory that Democrats intentionally proposed the most draconian cuts to provide public outrage, memories are short. Not that long ago, a Locker was quoted in a newspaper story saying that the cuts under consideration were things they had been suggesting for years.

The Lockers must be trying to scare us every time they make a recommendation.

And oh they do.

Governing by anecdote

Forget the in-depth studies and tax analyses.  Decisions in the General Assembly should be made by anecdote if you listen to some lawmakers, who like to use one story or singular instance to justify a statewide policy.

Rep. Bill Faison is the latest government-by-anecdoter, explaining to a local television station why he doesn't think raising class sizes in public schools is a big deal.

"I went through a school that there were never more than 32 kids to a class. And kids that came out of that educational process did well."

That ought to settle it, unless another legislator has ever heard of a school that had 50 students in a class. Come to think of it, plenty of kids that were educated in one-room school houses years ago turned out ok.

Maybe Faison can offer legislation to close and sell all the state's schools and start packing kids into one room. That would solve the budget crisis.

Two sides to rhetorical excess

Here's a thought. Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger and his allies like to describe the latest proposal to raise new revenue as a job-destroying or job-killing tax hike—without offering any empirical evidence to support the claim.

If that's the standard for the level of rhetoric, then shouldn't some of the deep budget reductions to human services be described as "people-killing cuts" and proposals to reduce education funding be called "classroom annihilating?"

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.