RALEIGH – It’s easy to say that when times are tough, you must set firm priorities. It can be hard to do – which is why, after all, it gets said so often.
Thousands of North Carolinians are discovering this for themselves at the moment, as they pick up the pieces from a lost job, a cut in pay, or some other financial setback. Once you get used to a certain standard of living, it’s hard to cut back to the bare necessities.
It’s even harder to make the tough decisions, however, if you’re still clinging to the hope that a sudden influx of money will resolve your problems. That’s how some North Carolina politicians, agency heads, and interest groups still see the state’s budget gap. They continue to believe that private households and businesses will suddenly forget their troubles and welcome higher taxes to keep state and local governments from having to enact significant budget cuts.
The General Assembly may, indeed, end up passing a big tax increase. But it won’t be because the taxpayers of North Carolina volunteer to open their wallets. It will happen only if legislative leaders conclude, rightly or wrongly, that taxpayer anger will subside before the 2010 elections.
The prospect of a taxpayer bailout of our profligate government is debilitating. It’s keeping lawmakers from accepting the reality of the situation, and allowing them to continue to harbor odd notions of what state government is for.
The Raleigh News & Observer pointed out a prime example of this phenomenon in a Sunday news package on proposed budget savings. For years, objective observers have argued that North Carolina maintains too many small, uneconomical prisons. It would cost less, they conclude, to close these institutions and house the same number of inmates in larger, regional facilities.
Some small prisons have, in fact, closed. But the Union Correctional Center in Monroe and the Haywood Correction Center in Hazelwood still remain. They have powerful defenders, including well-meaning lawmakers who praise their rehabilitation programs and local officials who don’t want to lose access to “free” inmate labor to perform construction and maintenance work.
While such arguments may sound persuasive, they reflect a failure to set the right priorities. The state does not operate a prison system, for example, in order to compel North Carolina taxpayers as a whole to subsidize the operation of city and county governments in communities that house prisons. I don’t mean to minimize the difficulty that affected cities and counties will experience coming up with the funds to pay for work crews previously provided from the ranks of prison inmates. But the situation isn’t akin to an unfunded state mandate on localities. For decades, the arrangement actually consisted of a transfer of income from counties without prisons to counties with prisons. Ending that transfer is in the best interest of state taxpayers as a whole, even if it’s painful for particular jurisdictions.
You hear similar arguments about other proposed budget savings, ranging from Medicaid changes to the elimination of non-teaching positions in the public schools. It’s critical to keep in mind that North Carolina does not fund and operate a medical safety net in order to benefit particular communities with big hospitals, to subsidize medical education, or to scam as much money as possible from taxpayers in other states. Nor does North Carolina operate a school system in order to provide employment opportunities.
The state exists to finance and/or perform certain basic services to which North Carolinians are entitled, either by natural right (e.g. public safety) or by civil right (e.g. public education). Constitutions respect the preexisting natural rights and create the civil ones. It’s the legislature’s job to carry out these responsibilities at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers, who happen to enjoy the right, enshrined in North Carolina’s constitution, to enjoy “the fruits of their own labor.”
Setting firm priorities isn’t easy. No one ever said it was.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation