The Senate's utopian budget
Published June 17, 2015
by Thomas Mills, Politics NC, June 17, 1015.
Republicans often complain that government programs pick winners and losers. Nobody is choosing winners and losers more than the GOP Senate. Winners are quite clearly people who are already doing well. Losers are the rest of us.
Senate Republicans are following the model of their ideological soulmate, Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas. The tax cuts they promised would spur huge economic progress have failed to deliver so they are doubling down and cutting taxes more. To offset the transfer of the tax burden to the middle class, they are gutting the biotechnology center, ending driver’s education, and again stiffing our most experienced teachers and most other state employees.
Like the Senate itself, it’s an ideological document, not a practical one. It’s all about keeping money in the pockets of individuals and nothing about public investments that help the state as a whole. It’s governing by Ayn Rand.
The cut to the biotechnology center will almost certainly cost more jobs than it creates. But that’s not what matters to the ideologues. To them, it’s a government funded operation so it must be bad. Combined with the end of the Renewable Energy Standard, high tech and emerging technologies have taken a hit that not only hurts jobs but further damages our national reputation.
The GOP ideologues are living in a fantasy world. They believe that if they just cut taxes and regulation low enough, they’ll create a business environment that will attract industry, spur innovation, and lead to massive economic growth. Unfortunately for them and for us, the rest of the country isn’t living in that world. Other states are investing in infrastructure, offering incentives, and using government investments to create an atmosphere attractive to industry and entrepreneurs. That’s where business will go, including some currently located here.
So far, the states living in the real world are winning. The ones trying to transform the country into a free-market utopia are losing. We’re competing with Kansas. Everybody else is playing on a different field.
June 17, 2015 at 10:54 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Yes "we" cannot leave money in the pockets of the people that actually earned it... better to put it in the pockets of overpaid/underperforming State government bureaucrats who will have definitely not earned it. This writer seems unaware that elections have consequences.
