RALEIGH – Today one of the three Wall Street rating firms downgraded North Carolina’s general obligation debt from Aaa to Aa1, as you can read in a nearby story. What I wanted to comment on briefly is the reaction from House Speaker Jim Black and Gov. Mike Easley.

Last year, speaking to a crowd of 1,000 angry taxpayers at the first “Tar Heel Tea Party” in Raleigh, I asked this rhetorical question: “What kind of dimwit would spend a dollar to save a few cents? Apparently, the kind that gets elected to the General Assembly.” I was talking about the comments of several legislators who had tried to sell a $700 million tax increase on the argument that it would reassure the bond market and thus preserve our top bond rating. Since a bond downgrade, though unwelcome, would only increase annual debt service payments by a few million dollars a year – $15 million tops – it could hardly serve as a reasonable pretext for grabbing hundreds of millions more of the taxpayers’ money.

It turns out that some folks weren’t happy with my choice of terms. Although I never compared legislators to “bugs crawling out from under a rock” – that was, famously, Dana Cope of the State Employees Association – my use of the term “dimwit” was considered bad form.

Sorry. The term fits perfectly. Consider what Speaker Black told the Associated Press about today’s bond downgrade:

“House Speaker Jim Black, D-Mecklenburg, said he hoped the Legislature might now be persuaded to keep a statewide half penny sales tax hike in place another year, instead of dropping it in January as called for in a House revenue bill. `It sounds like we can get it (the credit rating) back, if we do certain things,’ Black said.”

What Black is saying is that North Carolinians should pay a 7 percent retail sales tax instead of a 6.5 percent rate, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars this year, so that the state can save a few million dollars in debt service. That clearly puts him in the running for dimwit recognition.

He has tough competition in Gov. Easley, however. His spokesman immediately seized on the bond downgrade to call not just for the tax increase but also for a state lottery. It got a passing mention in the Moody’s report but did not receive a serious analysis from the company. Among other factors, I doubt Moody’s is aware of the governor’s wildly inflated revenue projection from his proposed lottery, which would open up another hole in the budget in future fiscal years as new program outstrip the lottery’s capacity for generating revenue.

I get the impression that any bad news, in Easley’s mind, is an argument for a lottery. Got a budget hole? Pass a lottery. Suffering a drought? Pass a lottery. Stuck in traffic? Gosh, if only we had a lottery!

“It’s time for all members of the General Assembly to put partisan politics aside and put the state first,” Easley spokesman Fred Hartmann said. Actually, this is one issue that has little to do with politics.