The budget that the Senate passed last night and that the House is likely to pass soon exposes more problems than it solves. The centerpiece of the document is a pay raise for teachers, viewed by legislators as a political necessity. But the cuts used to pay for the raise highlight the long-term revenue problems North Carolina faces. We don’t have enough money to fund our priorities.
Republicans passed the raise because of the public outcry over the state of public schools, not because of any commitment to education. The raises, though, won’t change the public’s perception. Republicans didn’t just short teachers. They treated them like the enemy. Anybody with kids or grandkids in public schools knows how much those schools hurt last year, and a single raise isn’t going to mollify anybody.
But it’s the cuts that are going to hurt. In the time honored tradition of budget cutters everywhere, the GOP targeted the people with the least political clout–the poor and infirm. They will almost certainly kick people off Medicaid who need the services. They also know that, unlike teachers, the victims won’t push back and their advocates don’t have enough clout to exact a political price.
All of this mess is due to the huge tax cuts for the rich that Republicans enacted last year. The GOP likes to argue that people have more money in their pockets, but nobody’s feeling it except the wealthy, and nobody asked for the tax cuts in the first place. Instead, people are starting to notice that their schools are suffering and, while the University system got a reprieve this year, it’s probably on the chopping block next. Poor people will take the biggest hit, but, unfortunately, not many people will notice their pain. So much for all those Christians in the legislature.
The GOP doesn’t talk about the revenue shortfall we’ve already faced or the bigger one we will face next year. Instead, the Republicans are still believing the free-market magical thinking that tax cuts will somehow increase revenue, or at least cover the loss. It has never happened. It never will.
Supposedly all of their tax cuts were going send us on a booming economic expansion that would increase tax revenue. That hasn’t happened, either. Instead, we’re one of a handful of states that still has fewer jobs than when the recession began.
The only people who have benefited from Republican rule are those who were already benefiting from our economic system. We’re another red state experiment, just like Kansas. The pain that state is feeling now, is the pain we’ll be feeling soon. Let’s hope the backlash in Kansas takes hold here sooner than later.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/06/11/1265021/tillis-gives-his-staff-fat-raises.html
So these politicians sweat it out giving teachers a pay raise by spreading out their longevity pay and calling it a raise. And THEN the same politicians reward their staffers by giving them a raise equivalent to what a teacher who has worked for over seven years makes in one year. I thought Republicans were all about smaller government and less bureaucracy.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/06/11/1265021/tillis-gives-his-staff-fat-raises.html.
To be fair, this article is from 2011.
Tom, to be fair, what raises did teachers get in 2011?
This GOP dominated legislature is so toxic, so damaging, it will be YEARS before NC can recover. This is not “the biggest raise” ever in NC history. NCGOP has codified a pay schedule that includes a raise every 5 years. A teacher who starts within the NC system today can expect five raises in 20 years. The longevity pay all state employees get has been lumped into the one-in-five-year raise for teachers – and for teachers only.
I am a parent with three children in the NC school system. I am DISGUSTED at how NCGOP treats teachers and education in general. They will wake up one day and realize states that have invested in education will surpass NC in educational achievement. In a global economy, the chances NCGOP is taking with education are wrong-headed and short-sighted. NCGOP WANTS an uneducated population – it is the only way they can be elected.
No, actually they won’t ever make that conscious realization. Why? Because by the time the damage becomes all too evident, it will be someone else’s problem.
The sad part is, the teachers suffer by having less, the children suffer because their education, the crux for everything they will ever be in life, has been grossly affected, and society suffers from not only the loss of the prospective results, but also in paying out double or triple what it has saved, long term/short term, to correct the Republican mistakes.
The #NCGOP blowhards in the state legislature fail to realize that education is as much of a market as anything else. Talented teachers will flee the state, once they realize that the next raise is years away – as per the new NCGOP schedule.
In the real world, the global economy calls for INVESTING in education. In the Tea Party fantasyland known as North Carolina, education is a burden that the state no longer wants to bear. (To paraphrase the president – They didn’t want to build that…)
Shame on Berger, Tillis, McCrory and their cronies. Shame on them.
The leaders of the GOP were warned last year that their tax cuts would create a revenue crunch and that the failure to accept the medicaid expansion would cost jobs, hurt healthcare providers, and shut down hospitals. They broke it. They own it.
A two act play. The Rise and Fall of the Republican Empire.
Say now, where’s that Nero feller? Oh yeah, he’s in the Governor’s Mansion!
Perhaps when the state’s credit rating is downgraded, as has happend in KS, there will be some pressure from the sane business community to get the NCGA to undo the mess they are making.