It was jarring a few weeks ago to hear a Republican state senator warn of “two North Carolinas where the rich continue to get richer and the poor get poorer.”
The speaker was Harry Brown from Onslow County. The Senate was debating a bill that would give poorer counties an opportunity to raise local sales taxes to help pay for schools, infrastructure and economic development — and catch up with wealthier, more urban counties.
The measure passed the Senate but eventually failed in the House. The irony was the view expressed by some Republicans that higher taxes could help counties that have not experienced an economic recovery.
Yet, even the supposedly wealthier cities have deep pockets of poverty. The phenomenon has been documented repeatedly, most recently in a Brookings Institution report on the growth and spread of poverty from 2000 to 2012. It found increasing numbers and concentrations of poor people in urban and suburban areas across the country.
It ranked Greensboro-High Point 15th in the country in the growth of poverty in that time, with a 77 percent increase in the number of poor people.
Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, Raleigh and Winston-Salem all experienced even faster rates of poverty growth.
Mayors of those and other North Carolina cities will have much to discuss when they meet in Greensboro Sept. 10 for the first in a series of poverty summits. Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan organized the session.
“We really need to put our resources together to come up with best practices to see how we can fight poverty,” she said last week.
Poverty drags down cities. It impacts community health and welfare and increases demands on police, schools, medical facilities and social services.
The question is what resources mayors have to ease poverty. They can lead economic development efforts and push for investment in infrastructure to make their communities more attractive to businesses in the hopes of creating more jobs. In the meantime, impoverished people need lifelines that too often are being cut at the state level.
North Carolina’s state government has refused to accept a federally funded expansion of Medicaid coverage, cut back on unemployment benefits and eliminated the earned-income tax credit — measures that help people avoid falling into poverty.
Meanwhile, state tax cuts that primarily benefit wealthy individuals and large corporations have allowed less funding per student enrolled in public schools, forced cuts at state universities and increased pressure on local governments to raise their property and sales tax rates — levies that disproportionately affect the poor and middle class.
Poor counties do fall further behind — hence the concern by senators whose policies are contributing to the problem. But even more poor people live in the state’s urban areas.
State and local governments must support efforts to improve public health, strengthen public education, maintain a safety net for people in crisis and create an inviting climate for job growth.
North Carolina won’t prosper when so many of its residents live in poverty.
