It’s nice to read today that The News & Observer is advocating responsible budget writing from our state’s leading lawmakers.
But one piece of the editorial bothered me. It’s the notion that:
[A]ny surplus on June 30, the last day of the fiscal year, could mean pay raises that state employees have had to do without. And pay raises for teachers, whose pay was to have been increased to the national average by now but hasn’t been. It’s road maintenance money, and funds to hire more environmental and workplace safety inspectors, and funds that were to have been spent to fix the way mental health services are provided to North Carolinians. It’s money that was drained from the state’s rainy day fund.
One fact that list ignores is that some of these items — including all of the pay raises and additional workers — lead to ongoing state expenses. It’s not wise to look at an end-of-the-year surplus as a missed opportunity for extra spending. That’s especially true when the extra spending leads to future budget obligations — obligations for which there is no expected revenue source.
We don’t want our government to end up with an overly large surplus at the end of the budget year; that means we’ve been overtaxed. But a small surplus means the government has generally squared its projected revenues and projected expenses pretty well.
We’ll leave for another day the debate over whether those revenue levels and spending levels are too high, too low, or just about right.
