The new budget will keep the ship of state more or less afloat and avoid some of the absolutely worst options that confronted lawmakers. As we’ve seen in a lot of other states where lawmakers have shortened school years, opened the jails and sold off every public asset they could get their hands on, things could be a heck of a lot worse than they are in North Carolina.
For progressives outside the narrow little world that is the General Assembly, such moments present a dilemma: On the one hand, thoughtful and caring people share the relief of insiders who rightfully point to just how truly dreadful things could have been. North Carolina is still not South Carolina or Mississippi or Alabama.
On the other hand, when all the congratulatory handshaking and backslapping dies down, North Carolina will still confront a simple and sobering “big picture” reality: The state budget is lousy. It is horrifically and dangerously inadequate. It spends far too little on a vast number of essential public services and structures and too much on several items that do little or nothing to advance the common good. Moreover, it is funded in an increasingly obsolete fashion that all but guarantees a perpetual state of fiscal crisis.
Perhaps the most glaring example is in public education. Just about everyone agrees that public education is the key to North Carolina’s future. We desperately need more and better teachers, principals, facilities, text books, computers, school buses, equipment, etc.... Dream as we might of magic solutions that will transform things on the cheap, the hard truth is that the only proven way to improve public education on a macro scale is to provide more children with more attention from more high quality teachers in more bright and healthy schools. This means spending money - a whole lot more than we spend now.
But, of course, this year’s K-12 budget doesn’t spend more; it spends millions less than last year. Yes, things may not be as bad as they could be. North Carolina is not the Third World. But by the standards of what a truly progressive, modern and competitive society ought to be striving for in the 21st Century, the education budget is terrible. It places more and more demands on a thinly stretched corps of professionals while imposing what amounts to a pay cut. This is nothing to be celebrated.
And so it goes throughout the budget. Children’s health insurance and mental health programs were not cut but remain badly underfunded. The state’s overcrowded prisons and judicial system will absorb big cuts. Early childhood programs: cut. Crime control and public safety: cut. Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: cut. Public Health: cut. Vocational rehabilitation: cut. Minority economic development: cut. Highway maintenance: cut. Many, many other solid and important public services and institutions: cut.
Meanwhile, though far fewer in number than those subjected to cuts, lawmakers continue to fund a sizable number of questionable programs and tax breaks - most notably in the areas of corporate giveaways (i.e., “business incentives”) and transportation (where infrastructure remains too often divorced from genuine need and environmental sustainability).
It’s true that the innumerable shortcomings of the North Carolina budget are nothing new. What this year’s budget does, in essence, is to strap a little more bailing wire and duct tape onto an old “beater” of a car that was already on its last legs and facing an uphill trip. What’s needed, of course, is a new, sleek, efficient state budget vehicle - one that relies upon a modern, adequate and fair tax system to secure the resources necessary to run a large, growing, urban state in the 21st Century.
How do we break out of the current trap and get to that point? If this year’s budget shows us anything, it’s that a mere combination of economic crisis and Democratic leadership is not enough to do the trick. While many good and wise lawmakers - several of them in positions of authority - would like to do much, much more, right now they perceive themselves as having accomplished all that is possible in the current political environment.
If progressive North Carolinians want to alter this political calculus, they will have to start raising a lot more heck than they have thus far.
Rob Schofield is the Director of Research and Policy Development at N.C. Policy Watch
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