Which is to say being a mediocre politician. Yesterday Gov. Bev Perdue gave a press conference in which she said:
“Let me be clear. I’ve got a record on it and I don’t like sweepstakes,” Perdue told reporters, but “until we can outlaw them or somehow the courts allow them to be outlawed forever, we need to tax the heck out of them and regulate them hard.”
Such taxes, she claimed, could bring in $300 million a year but offered no details on what a regulated and taxed sweepstakes/video poker industry in North Carolina would look like. She said that she was offering this up because Republicans in the General Assembly weren’t going along with her idea of raising the sales tax to fund education.
I’m giving them another pathway, another piece of a solution” she said. “The bottom line for me is that they’ve got to fund public schools in a different way. There’s got to be more resources for our kids.”
Problems? Why yes. The most obvious one being that if Perdue were serious about this, she could have put legalizing and taxing sweepstakes parlors in her proposed budget, which she submitted weeks ago, not just bring up the idea now, when the House has already passed a budget and the Senate wants to get all of its business done in the next week. And in any case, it’s just absurd to expect the General Assembly to figure out all the details in short order even if they were inclined to go along, which they aren’t. Her sweepstakes tax proposal thus is just a desperate, bizarre piece of passive-aggressive politicking by a wounded lame duck.
