RALEIGH – The North Carolina Senate’s budget proposal is due out this week, so some politicians are sweating, some activists are fretting, some special-interest groups are yelling, some campaign coffers are swelling, and some pundits are foretelling.
Personally, I think it’s all telling.
Let’s start with the sweating politicians. I’m all for a little political perspiration. It’ll be good for them. North Carolina’s political class has been self-congratulatory for so long that an extended period of utter disdain from a disgruntled voting public may knock some sense into them. Hope springs eternal.
As for the left-wing activists fretting about the imminent demise of all that is good and decent because the General Assembly won’t raise taxes, it’s worth remembering that the boy who cried wolf didn’t have a particularly good third act. Somehow, I think North Carolina can make it on a $19 billion General Fund budget instead of a $20 billion one.
And keep in mind that North Carolina is hardly the only political jurisdiction going through another difficult year. As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the April tax numbers are coming in for a number of states – and the results aren’t pretty. California’s April revenue collections were 26 percent below projection. Pennsylvania’s were 12 percent down.
Just like North Carolina, these states are going to have to make difficult choices soon. It being an election year, they probably won’t raise taxes much, if at all. They’ll cut spending. They’ll survive. North Carolina will, too.
That brings me to the yells of some of the most unjustifiably aggrieved interest groups in the budget debate. North Carolina’s largest teacher union made some noise over the weekend, staging a march in Raleigh that featured such sober and carefully constructed political arguments as “Show Schools the $$$.”
In a state saddled with many months of double-digit unemployment, public employees are unlikely to persuade skeptical taxpayers of the need for tax hikes by complaining about government budget cuts of relatively modest magnitude. Over the past couple of years, some North Carolinians have seen their private-sector workforces shrink by 25 percent, 50 percent, even 100 percent. Trying telling them that they still pay too little in taxes to preserve all the jobs of the existing government workforce and see how far the argument gets you.
Interestingly, while the spending lobbies are doing their usual poor-mouthing, their political defenders are out raising gobs of cash for the 2010 election cycle. So are their political foes, it must be said. Because I have no problem at all with raising private dollars from willing donors with which to communicate to voters, the prospect of an expensive election cycle doesn’t concern me. The political contests this year, from county commission all the way up to U.S. Senate, will help determine the future of our country for many years to come. They deserve a great deal of attention, media coverage, and paid advertising so voters will have some notion of what they’re doing when they get in the voting booth.
Finally, the political prognosticators are hard at work trying to foretell the outcome of all these spirited political contests. I think it’s far too early to offer firm predictions, but I do think that anyone who doesn’t see 2010 as the greatest opportunity for Republican legislative gains in decades is disconnected from reality.
That doesn’t mean the GOP is destined to capture the General Assembly. It does mean, however, that there is a reasonable chance this summer’s legislative debate over the state budget will be the last one to feature the same personalities, power brokers, and political dynamics that have become so familiar in recent years.
Just imagine what the North Carolina Association of Educators rally will look like next year if there’s a Republican legislature. One thing is for sure: the signage will probably be more picturesque, if not graphic.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.