For a short time yesterday, North Carolina’s “Bolshiest” public policy organization featured a blog post titled “18,000 Teachers to be Fired.” The post disappeared by early afternoon.
The author of the post, a former NC Democratic Party employee (not Skip Stam), wrote,
This morning Rep. Tricia Cotham (D – Mecklenburg) hosted a conference call on North Carolina’s budget. The call included Charlotte area elected officials, teachers, advocates, clergy, and neighborhood leaders.
Three weeks ago our budget deficit was 3.3 billion dollars. It was 4.2 billion dollars as of last Monday, and it is 4.6 billion dollars today. This number will likely be revised again.
Conservatives, led by budget and policy experts like Joe the Plumber, have a solution for this problem. Its the solution they have for most problems: cut public service and public servants. … Reduction in the number of teachers by at least 12,000, this number likely to be increased by 18,000
This raises some important questions.
1) Did the 18,000 teacher estimate come from Rep. Tricia Cotham? If not, whose estimate is it? NCAE?
2) Why is the estimate likely to increase to 18,000?
3) Why are these mystery estimators ignoring DPI estimates of teacher layoffs and the effect of natural turnover on the layoffs?
4) Even Joe the Plumber knows that the various cuts referenced in the post were proposed by Democrats. The fact that conservatives (and even Republicans) agree with some of the cuts does not mean, then, that conservatives are somehow in control of the budget. Really?
5) Why delete the blog post, anyway?
