A muddled start to the state budget dance
Published May 16, 2015
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, May 14, 2015.
House leaders began unveiling pieces of their state budget proposal Thursday and as always it was a mixed bag. The budget finally provides more money for textbooks in public schools for example, while at the same time increasing funding for the completely unaccountable school voucher scheme that may be declared unconstitutional by the N.C. Supreme Court.
Many of the biggest decisions won’t be revealed until Monday when the full budget is released—raises for teachers and state employees, incentives for business recruitment, changes to the state tax code, and the portion of the surplus put in the state savings account.
Overall the parts of the budget made public so far are similar to proposals made by Governor Pat McCrory two months ago in his spending plan with the anemic status quo preserved in most agencies and programs, maintaining funding levels that after several years of deep budget cuts fail to meet the needs of a growing and still struggling state.
House leaders will tout increased funding for education but with a few notable exceptions like more funding for textbooks and restoring support for driver’s ed, most of the new education money will pay to keep services at current levels—funding enrollment increases and keeping the same number of teacher assistants in the classroom after their ranks were reduced significantly in the last few years.
It is much the same in health and human services where House leaders pay for the increased cost of Medicaid and provide some additional funding for programs that desperately need it, like the Home and Community Care Block that helps pay for Meals on Wheels and other services that allow seniors to stay in their homes.
The House budget restores a million dollar cut made to the program last year and while that’s certainly welcome news, bringing a vital program back to a previous level of funding isn’t exactly a cause for massive celebration.
If there’s another theme running the House budget other than largely preserving the unacceptable status quo, it is the conservative ideology sprinkled through it in policy provisions. Not only does the House plan expand the unaccountable school voucher scheme, it allows students at private online universities to received need-based student aid.
The budget also gives $2 million over the next two years to the school privatization advocacy group Parents for Educational Freedom NC to help increase the number of charter schools in rural areas of the state. Another provision would explore a new way to set up classrooms that could increase class size.
There’s money set aside for Medicaid “reform,” though no reform plan has been presented as the misleading attacks on Medicaid continue.
It’s also worth noting that the House budget was largely put together in secret by a handful of House members which little input from members of budget committees that stopped meeting weeks ago.
Republican lawmakers railed against such a process when they were in the minority. Their only response now when asked about the lack of transparency is to say that Democrats did it too.
But even with the inadequate budget, the secret process, and the conservative ideology included in the House spending plan, the most ominous budget news of the week was the declaration by Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger Monday that “now is the time to focus on cutting the personal income tax significantly.”
That’s exactly the wrong course. Corporate taxes are already scheduled to go down next year and again the year after that, taking more than $300 million out of the state’s coffers. More cuts to the personal income tax would leave even less to pay for ongoing needs, much less restore some of the damaging cuts made in recent years.
Yet that appears to be where the Senate is headed. That means the final spending plan is likely to be a compromise between the House’s inadequate proposal that many advocates are describing with the “it could have been worse” label and a Senate plan that makes more cuts to pay for more tax breaks for the wealthy.
That’s not much of a choice and the people lawmakers are supposed to be representing deserve better.
