RALEIGH – If you are still wondering why North Carolina’s budget debate turned out the way it did – with a bipartisan coalition of state legislators overriding Gov. Beverly Perdue’s veto – here’s one way of thinking about it.
Perdue’s closing argument was that the General Assembly’s budget plan would do “generational damage” to North Carolina’s public schools. Although a few gullible editorialists repeated it without question, the argument made no sense. That’s why it convinced no one who wasn’t already on Perdue’s side in the first place.
As House Speaker Thom Tillis, a Republican from Mecklenburg County, subsequently explained in an interview with the Charlotte Business Journal, the difference in K-12 education spending between the governor’s plan and the legislature’s plan was less than a percentage point. (The difference in total General Fund spending, on all programs, was about two percentage points.) To assert “generational damage” from the legislature’s plan, then, required Gov. Perdue to attempt some fancy rhetorical footwork.
She’s not that good a dancer. As Tillis pointed out:
There’s only one of two positions I can assume she can take. One is that her budget that she recommended caused irreparable harm or 50 basis points is the difference between [a budget] that works and one that causes irreparable harm. She can’t have it both ways. She’s staked herself out on education funding and on K-12 we’re a half-percentage point apart.
More generally, Perdue’s budget reduced General Fund spending by about 4 percent from the baseline. The budget she vetoed, the one that became law anyway, cut spending by about 6 percent.
That means that most of the effects of state budget cuts were a given no matter who prevailed in the final standoff. They were contained in the budget Perdue herself proposed earlier in the year. This was particularly true in the area of K-12 education, where true difference in spending was tiny.
Tillis went on to contrast the lobbying strategy of interest groups associated with North Carolina higher education and those associated with public schools. Among community college and university officials, the prospect of budget cuts was certainly an unpleasant one. But they never treated it as unthinkable or outrageous. They worked with legislative leaders to refine the initial proposals for budget cuts and thus limited the effect on their core programs.
But the North Carolina Association of Educators and Gov. Perdue approached the issue differently. They believed that by picking a high-profile fight over the Republican budget plan, they would provoke a massive public response and compel GOP leaders in the legislature to accept Gov. Perdue’s somewhat-higher funding level.
It didn’t work.
For one thing, like it or not, most North Carolinians have not spent their late spring and early summer following the day-to-day machinations of Jones Street. They are busy. Many are also worried about their own jobs and economic prospects, and unlikely to be stirred to political action behind the idea of paying higher taxes to protect the jobs of a few government employees and contractors.
When you add in the fact that the higher taxes wouldn’t have changed education budgets much anyway, you end up with a lot of sound and fury from the governor and her allies, signifying nothing.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.