Republican House Speaker Hall faces a ‘fiscal cliff’ created by his party’s reckless tax cuts | Opinion

In his recent op-ed, Speaker Destin Hall frames the current Republican budget standoff in the North Carolina General Assembly as a noble fight to “hold the line” for North Carolina’s future.

He argues that the House is trying to save the state from a looming fiscal cliff caused by automatic tax cuts. He is right that the danger is real. But he skips past a crucial piece of evidence: House and Senate Republicans are the ones who built the cliff.

The “fiscal cliff” Speaker Hall is working so hard to avoid is the direct result of automatic tax triggers his own party enacted just a few years ago. They passed laws cutting revenue years in the future without knowing what the economy would look like.

In the legal world, we don’t call that “fiscal conservatism.” We call it negligence.

How can any responsible actor set a financial time bomb and then ask for credit when they try to defuse it?

Meanwhile, North Carolinians are suffering from fifteen years of underinvestment since Republicans took control in 2011.

We’re now 48th in education funding, 50th in healthcare costs, and billions behind on infrastructure. Housing is unaffordable for this generation’s youth, and if you’ve looked at your power bill lately, you know the pressure families are under.

The problem is that Republicans in North Carolina keep confusing “cutting taxes” with “saving you money.”

They are not the same thing.

What people want is more money in their pocket, but a cheap government is expensive.

When the General Assembly fails to invest in schools, roads, and healthcare in the name of mindless tax cuts, they aren’t actually saving us a dime. They are increasing our cost of living. We pay for their “savings” in higher medical bills. We pay in lost wages when schools shut down for HVAC failures. And we pay in hours burned in traffic and paychecks crushed by longer commutes, extra child care, and gas bills just to survive broken infrastructure. All for income tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the richest in North Carolina, not us.

Many of the tax cuts they champion are simply going to wealthy corporations anyway. Republicans are fighting to eliminate corporate taxes altogether—something that will frequently benefit out-of-state companies.

According to the NC Budget and Tax Center, 77 percent of North Carolinians oppose that, and for good reason: companies benefiting from our roads, our workers, and our police officers should invest in them too.

To make matters worse, this is a shell game. When the state shirks its bills, the cost lands on our doorsteps in the form of higher county property taxes. The General Assembly has forced hundreds of millions of dollars in costs down to local taxpayers through devastating school cuts and “unfunded mandates,” where the legislature requires counties to do things but doesn’t pay for it. And then, somehow, those very same Republicans keep complaining about their property taxes. They ought to deliver that complaint to a mirror.

The Speaker is right to worry about the deficit, but he is wrong about the solution. We don’t need a truce between Republican factions; we need a budget that actually invests in our state. No more “cuts” that just reappear even larger in your property tax bill or your family’s expenses.

Everyone should be able to thrive in their local community. To get to that place, we’ll need to return to being a forward-looking state that smartly invests in its future and in working families. It’s so much bigger than a budget fight between Speaker Destin Hall and Senate Leader Phil Berger. Fifteen years of failed leadership and underinvestment has brought us to this place, and neither the House nor the Senate budget will bring us out of it.

The House certainly has the better argument in this specific stalemate—at least they see the wall we are about to hit. But they can’t pretend they weren’t driving the car as we accelerated toward it.

Phil Rubin, a Democrat, represents Northwest Raleigh, District 40, in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

This story was originally published December 12, 2025 at 4:30 AM.