Just bumbling along

by | Jun 19, 2014 | Education, Environment, NC Politics

There are state governments that enact awful right-wing policies but execute them decently. Ours does not make the list. Instead, the Republican Counter-revolutionaries seem to pick the most foolish possible ways to pursue dubious courses of action.

North Carolina Republican bungling spans nearly every policy area, with the environment perhaps the most vivid. Their poor judgment ranges from comic to mind-boggling. Rather than implement careful, painstakingly developed rules for Jordan Lake, they chose to deploy wacky solar-powered whirligigs. It really is amusing. Less entertaining is their decision to let fracking chemicals stay secret, first approved less than a week after a West Virginia river got flooded with poison. Only the NCGOP could see a coal company ruin a river, and make a gas spill harder to prepare for.

From the environment we go to education. Republicans see teacher raises as politically crucial, and funding them should be straightforward: cancel next year’s tax cuts. However, common sense is a conservative taboo, so the House is trying instead to get more poor people addicted to gambling. Even more despicably, they lied about it. Nelson Dollar not only had the cynicism to prey on the vulnerable, he attempted subterfuge in moving the policy forward. How he thought he’d get away with it is beyond me.

If environmental policy is the most evocative, and education the most prominent, child development is most consequential. Preschool and childcare are the best human capital investments around. Yet state Republicans, in their commitment to mindless laissez-faire, are in the process of sabotaging both. Since taking control in 2011, Republican budget writers have continually attacked Smart Start. The assault will get worse if they lift some child care licensure requirements. Given the “hellish” conditions of American daycare, that would be nothing short of scandalous.

Although maddening, Republican recklessness is explicable. Laissez-faire advocates seldom know much about public policy. This isn’t surprising since they’d like most government programs to vanish. On top of that, our governor is so shallow he literally doesn’t seem to do know what he’s doing. So we have a legislature too ignorant to govern, a governor too oblivious to counteract them, and a government in dire need of change.

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