Spending & Taxes

The American Rescue Plan Act's $130 billion for K-12 education included $3.6 billion for North Carolina public schools, but strangely for an emergency, only 5 percent of that education spending will be spent this year. It's clear that this massive spending is about rewarding teachers’ unions and other constituencies that helped both Joe Biden and Roy Cooper get elected.

The largest increase in Cooper's proposed state appropriations would be for employee salaries and benefits. Cooper's proposal does not provide price tags for Leandro or Medicaid expansion. Cooper would also eliminate successful and popular Opportunity Scholarships.

Cooper’s 2021-23 biennium budget is more a political statement than a realistic proposal. It would leave state government fiscally fragile and at greater risk of layoffs and tax increases in a future recession.

Cooper’s budget proposal is an unrealistic political document, not a serious budget plan. It would increase budgeted expenditures over the current year by 11.6 percent. The budget would direct hundreds of millions to cronies and “niceties” that are outside the core functions of state government.

Cooper recommends 11 and 16 percent spending increases for K-12 public education for the next biennium, focusing on teacher and administrator pay increases, bonuses, hiring more staff and raising pay to $15/hour for noncertified staff.

The new Comprehensive Remedial Plan to comply with the Leandro ruling lacks critical details for how its measures would provide all public school children a sound basic education. Democrats and activists are pressuring the Republican-led General Assembly to adopt these expensive proposals — or the judge to force them despite the constitutional separation of powers.

North Carolina has a fund balance of $5.4 billion, the state has yet to spend $254 million of previous federally distributed aid, and schools will receive another $3.8 billion in aid because of the American Rescue Plan. Since the aid is more than needed to return children to the classroom and spread out over seven years, it should be seen for what it is: a bailout for teacher unions from Democratic lawmakers.

Any state that has $5.4 billion in unspent money should have no need for another $5.2 billion, especially since taking the money could mean no tax cuts until 2024.

Program Evaluation Division has served a useful purpose, but it was limited in what it could recommend. Partisan staff can more easily identify solutions, provide strategic advice, and answer “why” questions.

Each government agency and program is created to do a job. Legislators should regularly review those jobs and how programs perform them. Regulatory sunset reviews provide a good model to emulate.