The political context as the General Assembly prepares to reconvene this month is not unlike the situation in Washington. The chief executive must show he can advance his agenda with legislative leaders who have not shown him respect, and legislative leaders must avoid swinging so far right it hurts their chances of retaining power in 2016.
But unlike lame-duck President Barack Obama, Gov. Pat McCrory must position himself to run for re-election in 2016. And unlike the do-nothing Congress, the Republican-dominated General Assembly does, and undoes, too much as it pursues an agenda that’s half voodoo economics and half tea party hysteria.
For North Carolina’s sake, we hope the prospect of a presidential election with a larger and more diverse electorate will concentrate the Republican mind. Should the GOP take a more practical and less ideological turn, here are issues that ought to be on the agenda.
• Budget and taxes. Tax revenue projections indicate that Republicans cut taxes too deeply in 2013. Revenue is running hundreds of millions of dollars less than expected. Meanwhile, there’s virtually no evidence that lower taxes on corporations and high-income individuals are drawing more corporations to locate here or prompting more spending by the wealthy that trickles down in the form of more jobs and better pay for middle- and lower-income North Carolinians.
The General Assembly should adjust the tax code to capture more revenue from where most of the recovery’s wealth is going: corporate profits and capital gains by those heavily invested in the record-breaking stock market. Lawmakers also should adopt tax changes Democrats can support in terms of closing tax-code loopholes and eliminating special exemptions. The only alternative to changing the tax code is further cutting a state budget that is already insufficient.
• The justice system. The third branch of government has long been neglected with regard to funding, but the situation has become acute under Republican rule. The state must invest more to reduce court docket backlogs with better informational technology, especially electronic filing, and more court-related staff. The state’s Chief Justice Mark Martin has made it a priority to lobby for more funding for the court system. His fellow Republicans in the legislature should listen to him.
Meanwhile, the state’s prisons are struggling to provide humane treatment for a wave of mentally ill inmates dumped into the system because of a lack of mental health treatment facilities. Those inmates now number 4,600, or 12 percent of the state prison population. The conditions some of these inmates endure, many of them in solitary confinement, are a scandal that would shock Dorothea Dix, who advocated better care of the state’s mentally ill in the 19th century. That it’s still an issue in the 21st century should shame the state’s government and all of us.
• Education. The annual whittling of the state’s support for the University of North Carolina system has to stop. Shrinking state support is shifting the burden to student tuition, saddling young people with debt and reneging on the state constitution’s promise to provide higher education to North Carolinians at an affordable cost.
Meanwhile, the state’s public school system is being choked for funds. The legislature gave teachers an election-year raise in 2014, but those raises must continue until average salaries at least match the national average. Local school systems are also straining under reduced state funding. Properly funding public education is a basic obligation of the General Assembly. Lawmakers should meet it.
• Medicaid expansion.North Carolina remains part of a shrinking group of states – now down to 23 – that refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Holding out is costing the state billions of dollars in federal aid and inhibiting the ability of hospitals to offer a full range of care. It’s time for lawmakers to give up an anti-Obama protest that only hurts the state. The math is plain. The need is clear. Expand Medicaid.
