RALEIGH – I was wrong.
Some weeks ago, I predicted on “N.C. Spin” that House and Senate negotiators would hammer out a compromise by the end of July. Now, it appears, there may be a third vote to enact a continuing resolution while legislative leaders continue to jockey for position on a host of issues, many only tangentially related to the spending plan itself.
Sen. Tony Rand, the powerful Democrat from Fayetteville, may have been engaging in a bit of hyperbole when he talked of “about 25 things that keep coming up,” but there is certain no shortage of differences between the chambers to keep negotiators busy over the weekend and into next week.
Though it seems unlikely, for example, that the final budget bill will enact a state-run lottery outright, as some of the Senate might have preferred to accomplish on the sly, it will probably contain important lottery provisions. It may authorize certain games, advertising options, or destinations for the proceeds. Gov. Mike Easley has long championed the idea and would like finally to claim victory on it, thus perhaps giving legislators some leverage with the governor on other issues such as his preference to limit annual state spending to a measurement of the state’s personal-income growth.
One possible deal – not that I would commend it to anyone’s attention other than as an example of government perfidy – would be to smuggle in the governor’s favorite lottery provisions in exchange for applying his spending cap “creatively” to allow some budget items to lie outside it, and thus to pop it.
On cigarette taxes, a vocal contingent among House Democrats continues to insist on no more than a 25-cent increase in the current tax of five cents per pack. Senate Democrats want a 35-cent hike. Meeting in the middle, at 30 cents, would mean about $30 million in higher taxes annually than the House plan would chisel out of disproportionately low-income smokers. Again, not that I’d like it at all, but one could imagine a deal in which House members are induced to accept a slightly higher tax in exchange for some kind of tax relief on the back end for tobacco growers or businesses. Or perhaps the tax will rise by 25 cents at first and then go up more later.
On these and other issues — the UNC tuition scuffle among them — the compromise position between the House and Senate in the budget negotiations was visible weeks ago. Why hasn’t a deal been struck? One can invent all sorts of personal or political explanations, but the plain fact is that a deal hasn’t been struck yet because it didn’t have to be. Unlike most other states and our neighbors, North Carolina has no formal limit on legislative sessions. In theory, there is some political pressure to wrap things up and go home, but in practice lawmakers expect few voters to pay attention to Raleigh shenanigans in the middle of the summer. Now, with the school year coming in a few weeks, there’s somewhat more pressure to finish up.
This is, of course, a silly way to conduct the state’s business. There should be a hard, fixed deadline. If professors completed their classes in May and then let students turn in term papers whenever they wanted to, quite a few would likely show up at the end of the summer, if even then.
It’s worse with lawmakers – they get paid more the longer they procrastinate. That should cease.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.