Thank goodness New Year’s gives everyone an opportunity to renounce their sinful ways and turn their lives around. North Carolina’s leaders, especially, could use the opportunity. To help them along, the John Locke Foundation compiled a Top 10 list, in reverse priority, of New Year’s resolutions state leadership should adopt:
10. Bag the Global TransPark. All their pipe dreams about the GTP having failed, state leaders should once and for all line up the crosshairs on the white elephant in Kinston and pull the trigger. Any politician who still believes the GTP will turn a profit probably is tripping on PCP.
9. Derail “Smart Growth.” A better term for smart growth should be “malignant growth.” Besides depriving homeowners of their rights, making real estate unaffordable, wasting billions of dollars in public transit projects, herding people into hamster cages, fouling traffic, and worsening air pollution, smart growth makes sense. Let consumers, through the free market, decide where and how they want to live.
8. Snuff Out Golden LEAF. Born in blackmail, Golden LEAF amounts to a slush fund manipulated by Gov. Mike Easley and Senate leader Marc Basnight. The hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Golden LEAF would be better spent on health-care programs, as originally intended, or on alleviation of North Carolina’s excessive tax burden, much of which pays for health care spending.
7. Restrain Annexation. North Carolina is among a handful of states that allow municipalities to annex nearby unincorporated areas with little restriction. Residents to be annexed are powerless to stop the seizure. An easy way to fatten general funds, annexation has become a weapon of choice among municipalities. It’s time for the legislature to give suburbanites a real say in the matter.
6. Stop Raiding Trust Funds. Using the budget deficit as a convenient excuse, Gov. Mike Easley and his political allies have raided many trust funds to finance programs they liked better than those stipulated by the trusts. Many of these funds have been drained so dry that it’s doubtful they will recover anytime soon, if ever.
5. Ban Economic Development Programs. So-called economic development represents a comparatively new branch of state government that knows no bounds. Almost any corporate project, especially one that generates a lot of publicity for politicians, can be classified as “economic development.” The amount and number of the giveaways, although technically framed by law, actually are limited only by the imagination and guile of the state’s political class.
4. Winnow Government Nonprofits. The scandal surrounding U.S. Rep. Frank Ballance, D-1st District, and his John A. Hyman Foundation last year dramatically illustrated glaring weaknesses in North Carolina’s accountability of hundreds of nonprofits the state funds to the tune of about $700 million annually. Beyond the state auditor’s call for periodic reports to be filed by individual nonprofits, the legislature should consider why and whether the state should continue to fund so many of these organizations.
3. Change Redistricting. Perhaps no other issue has so poisoned the atmosphere in North Carolina as redistricting. Because of the political machinations, the public has lost what little confidence it had in leaders to conduct its business. The bitter battle in the legislature and in the courts seems to have no end nor reflect any moral consciousness by the participants. Allegiance to party affiliation, and pork-barrel commitments, rather than obligation to constituents as a whole, guide the thoughts and actions of North Carolina’s leaders. A commission might help, but there is no substitute for a coherent set of neutral, enforceable rules and honorable leaders who put the state’s welfare ahead of their party’s interests.
2. Crack Down on Corruption. The downfall of former Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps and the probability of federal charges being brought against Ballance laid bare a serious problem in state politics. Phipps’s cavalier manner in breaking the law and legislative leadership’s lack of public rebuke of Ballance reveal the political elite’s arrogance, or perhaps tacit acceptance of wrongdoing. The situation cries for forceful action by state leaders to demonstrate they are serious about ridding North Carolina of corruption and about restoring the public’s shaken faith in government.
1. Taxpayer Development. Personal income taxes and sales taxes have risen so much under the Easley administration that growing choruses of North Carolinians are beginning to howl they’ve had enough. Forget about offering enticements to selected corporations. Easley and his legislative allies should start offering economic incentives, i.e. tax cuts, to under-appreciated citizens to keep them from moving away to states where the taxes are lower.