RALEIGH – With her State of the State address and subsequent budget proposal, Gov. Beverly Perdue sought to put the new Republican leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly in a box.
On the one hand, Perdue borrowed liberally (so to speak) from the GOP’s longstanding platform of fiscal restraint, privatization, government organization, regulatory reform, and tax relief.
Her budget plan eliminates as many as 10,000 positions across state government, though only about 3,000 represents current employees to be laid off. She’d consolidate 14 major state agencies into eight departments, raise university and community college tuition, ditch dozens of wasteful or ineffective programs such as dropout-prevention grants, and slash the corporate income tax rate to 4.9 percent in 2012, down from 6.9 percent today.
On the other hand, Perdue refused to eliminate any teacher or teacher-assistant positions in the public schools, budgeted a shift of some $200 million in state-funded education expenses to counties, and proposed to reapply most of a $1 billion sales-tax increase Perdue promised in 2009 would be a “temporary” expedient.
The governor’s strategy was designed to steal the Republicans’ thunder on some issues – reducing the size and reach of state government and fostering stronger economic growth through tax and regulatory relief – while picking a fight with them on education.
It’s a tricky maneuver. Perdue is implicitly granting the validity of the conservative fiscal argument: North Carolina government costs too much and employs too many people. If a Democratic governor is willing to shed 10,000 state positions, the GOP can say, let’s shed several thousand more and let the temporary sales-tax hike disappear as scheduled.
Not if those positions are in the classroom, Perdue will respond, because that would be a cut too far. It’s better to raise taxes instead.
As for the cost-shift to counties, Perdue is counting on angry school board members and commissioners – many of whom are now Republicans for the first time – to pressure GOP legislators to restore state funding, thus further reducing their capacity to reject her sales-tax proposal.
In the end, I think that Perdue’s maneuver will prove too tricky to pull off. While forcing Republican legislators into the position of endorsing large-scale layoffs of classroom teachers would, indeed, be a political coup, it’s not going to happen.
The truth is that there are other non-education items that Perdue chose to defend and that many Republicans seek to cut, including business-subsidy programs. “Let’s tax consumers to fund corporate welfare” is not exactly a slogan likely to turn out liberal activists to defend the governor’s plan. And even in education, legislative leaders can find more budget savings than Perdue proposed without laying off a single classroom teacher.
For one thing, the governor tried to conflate teachers and teacher assistants. They aren’t the same thing. Most studies show that spending money on teacher assistants doesn’t pay off in student learning, and most states don’t spend as much on them as North Carolina does. It’s not a good use of scarce resources.
As for teaching positions, there are thousands of teachers who retire, change careers, or move out of the state every year. North Carolina can save hundreds of millions of dollars by keeping most these positions vacant for the next two fiscal years. No layoffs are required.
If Perdue is trying to put the Republicans in a box, it’s a flimsy one. In reality, the governor has the bigger political problem. Unlike the GOP leaders, she is a known quantity among voters across the state. Anything they see about next year’s budget that they don’t like will be blamed on her, no matter how tricky her rhetorical footwork may be.
And nearly every time Republicans or the news media discuss Perdue’s sales-tax plan, they will point out that it directly contradicts the promise she made in 2009 that the tax increase would last only two years.
Back then, when asked why the voters of North Carolina should believe her sales-tax hike would be temporary, Perdue replied, “Because I’m the governor.”
Yes, she is – and in a political predicament of her own making.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.