NC General Assembly stays the course – going backward

No matter what you think of the legislation passed during the General Assembly session that ended last week, you’ve got to give the Republican leadership high marks for consistency.

As the Republicans completed their fifth session with control of both chambers, they did not stray in their approach to lawmaking. They remained uninterested in public comment, careless about consequences and immune to learning from experience.

With those qualities locked in place, they completed another lap on the same ruinous circuit: Cut taxes on the rich and big corporations, expand the regressive sales taxes and motor vehicle fees, continue to underfund public schools and the University of North Carolina system, hold fast with the dwindling number of states refusing to expand Medicaid, meddle in the affairs and curtail the powers of local governments, reduce environmental protection regulations and take a few cracks at gay people, abortion rights, people using food stamps and illegal immigrants.

This was a session in which the best news is bad ideas that didn’t make it into law. There was no passage of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, essentially a license for businesses to discriminate against gay people. (Though lawmakers did override the governor’s veto to pass a law allowing magistrates to opt out of performing gay marriages.)

And a version of the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights that would have capped the personal income tax at 5 percent and limited budget growth to the rate of inflation and changes in population will not be proposed as an amendment to the state constitution. And lawmakers backed off a budget provision that would have limited state funding for light rail to $500,000 per project, a cap that would have effectively killed a light rail plan now developing in Orange and Durham counties.

Those near misses moderated the damage, but two larger concerns kept rolling forward. First is a pattern of passing bills on short notice with little public comment, or stuffing major policy issues into the state budget and avoiding public comment entirely. Second is the continuing tax cuts matched by weak funding. The tax cuts, once fully in place, will cost more than $1 billion annually in lost revenue. Meanwhile, state spending as a share of the state economy is well below the average of the last 45 years. The state is lowering taxes on those benefiting the most from the nation’s economic recovery – the wealthy and major corporations – while leaving state spending at recession-era levels.

The only way to stop the depletion of the state’s resources and the erosion of support for education, the environment and people in need is with votes. Until the damage becomes clear to enough voters, the state legislature will continue to lead North Carolina backward.

This story was originally published October 3, 2015 at 2:17 PM with the headline "NC General Assembly stays the course – going backward."