In passing the cost of driver education to parents of high school students, state lawmakers appear to be playing a shell game with the taxes North Carolina drivers have been paying for 57 years to support the program. When tax dollars earmarked for specified services no longer pay for those services, the government should not get to keep the money.
If that is what is happening in the case of a $3 charge added to license plate fees for driver education, it represents more than an injustice to taxpayers. It collides head-on with the conservative ideology espoused by the majority leadership in Raleigh.
As reported in Tuesday’s Daily Reflector, the 2014-15 state budget includes a provision to stop funding the driver education program from the state’s Highway Fund. Local school systems are to pay for the program using “available funds.”
That means school systems must absorb the cost or ask for more money from county taxpayers, neither of which is likely. More likely is that the full cost of driver education — $305 per student in Pitt County — will be passed to students and their parents.
Driver education advocates say the steep cost will translate to an estimated 35 percent decrease in eligible students enrolling in driver education courses. That means more students will wait to obtain a driver’s license until age 18, when one can take the state driving test without having completed a driver education course.
There are legitimate concerns about how that might affect crash rates, fatality rates and other highway safety statistics — numbers that ultimately help drive insurance rates. Highway safety, after all, is what state lawmakers had in mind when they implemented the driver-training program in 1957, and the license plate fee — now at $3 — to fund it.
There is debate over whether the fee still exclusively goes to fund driver education. If it does not, the state comptroller should be able to pinpoint when exactly those dollars intended for driver education began going somewhere else in the budget, and why.
What is not debatable is that for nearly 60 years tax dollars have been flowing from the pockets of every North Carolina motorist to pay for driver education. To remove the service with no relief to those paying for it — and requiring others to pay again — amounts to something akin to highway robbery.
Not what we should expect from a GOP-led Legislature that professes a desire to shrink government’s reach into our personal lives.
