The drought in North Carolina and the rest of the South has evoked cries for water conservation. The situation is so bad that Gov. Mike Easley recently urged the state’s citizens to cut their water usage in half. Water is a precious resource, and certainly it should be used wisely when it’s in short supply.

Times have been tight in other ways, too. Remember the recession that hit after Sept. 11, 2001? Several years after that dark day North Carolinians pulled the state gravy train through a tunnel of despair while the governor and the General Assembly piled on higher taxes. Since Easley took office, the state’s operating budget has soared from $14.4 billion to $20.4 billion — a total increase of about 42 percent in only seven years.

Nowadays, gas prices are skyrocketing, home foreclosures are rising at an alarming rate, health insurance remains unaffordable for many families, and personal savings accounts have fallen to an all-time low. Yet North Carolina’s leaders continue to swim in revenue as though they’re vacationing in the Bahamas.

Water is vital, but money, as well, is a precious resource. It buys things such as food, and water itself. Depending upon the health of the economy, money also can become scarce. If forecasters are correct, an economic downturn lurks around the corner. Already, retailers are cutting prices long before this year’s Christmas season.

Now would be a good time for the governor and the legislature to exercise some civic responsibility and start conserving the resources they take from families. Following the governor’s lead on offering tips for consumers to save water, here are a few ways the political elite could curb their wasteful habits:

  • Put buckets next to their chairs when they sit down so excessive tax collections can spill from their pockets into the pails. A few million dollars here and there is mere pocket change to politicians, but to their poor constituents it represents the difference between making or breaking family budgets. The big spenders could pour the runoff into a fund to build new water reservoirs around the state.
  • Buy rain barrels for the state’s rainy day fund to obviate any need for further tax increases.
  • Put a brick in the loopholes that continue to allow Speaker of the House Joe Hackney and Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight to maintain slush funds at the Department of Transportation. Then flush the spoils system at DOT and funnel the savings into construction of badly needed new roads.
  • Tap the billions of dollars that Easley and Basnight manipulate through Golden LEAF and channel the money into the General Fund.
  • Use zero-based budgeting, so state agencies won’t have an overflowing pool of revenue to splash around any way they please year after year.
  • Stop laundering money and clean up corruption. This alone could save untold millions of gallons of revenue.
  • Dismantle the massive pipeline that irrigates corporate welfare.
  • Install a money-saving showerhead, such as a Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, or TABOR. A TABOR would require amending the state’s constitution to (1) limit the growth in state revenue and spending to the growth of population plus inflation; (2) ensure surplus revenue above this amount is returned to taxpayers; and (3) require voter approval for tax increases or any weakening of the amendment’s limits. Colorado taxpayers received more than $3 billion in surplus revenue from 1992 to 2004.
  • Shorten legislative sessions to lessen the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. “Scientists” speculate that the hot air spewing from the Legislative Building might be contributing to global warming.

All these conservation tips are environmentally friendly: They return more green to taxpayers, and they develop a “sustainable” economy.

Richard Wagner is the editor of Carolina Journal.