RALEIGH — It’s just too easy, so I’m not going to do it.
I’m not going to make an Arnold Schwartenegger/election pun using one of his movie titles. It’s too easy. Total Recall? The Running Man? Terminator? Even End of Days works, in the sense that “doesn’t it signify the end of the world when Arnold Schwartzenegger has to worry about Gary Coleman getting to his political right, Larry Flynt getting to his political left, and Gallagher getting to his center — with a melon missile?”
No, I refuse.
It is worth noting, however, amidst the circus atmosphere that now pervades California politics, that the Golden State’s political leadership did manage a feat that our own “leaders” in North Carolina couldn’t pull off: it passed a state budget for the next year that didn’t raise the state’s already high tax rates.
California’s budget deficit was far bigger than North Carolina’s, not just in dollars but on a percentage basis. But with an unpopular Gov. Gray Davis facing the very real prospect of being recalled by the voters, his fellow Democrats in the state legislature believed that a vote for higher taxes would bring certain doom not only for Davis but for many of their own membership.
Not that this was the legislative Democrats’ original budget strategy. Accidently speaking into a system of “squawk boxes” that piped legislative debates into the offices of staff, reporters, and lobbyists, members of California’s Democratic Study Group plotted in late July to block passage of any state budget, speculating that the resulting deadlock might convince voters to approve a statewide initiative the following year to junk California’s supermajority requirement for raising taxes. Given that many of these same legislators had accused Republicans of playing politics with the budget, the resulting media furor played a major role in pushing Democrats to join with Republicans to pass a no-new-tax budget.
Now, I’d be the first to say that I don’t agree with some of the devices California legislators used to bring the state budget in “balance.” But with the sorry shape of the state’s economy, almost anything would have been preferable to hiking sales, income, or other taxes further. In North Carolina, by contrast, the debate among state lawmakers and Gov. Mike Easley was never whether to raise taxes, but which ones and by how much.
The moral of the story is that North Carolina either needs a constitutional amendment to create a recall process or an amendment setting a higher legislative threshold for raising taxes — or both. Otherwise, we’ll keep getting the same kind government in Raleigh and the same kind of misleading, self-serving rhetoric out of Raleigh about how “we couldn’t help it” and “the economy made me do it.”
Talk about your True Lies.
Uh, sorry.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.