Led by a multitude of gutsy teachers, thousands of people flooded downtown Raleigh today for the biggest Moral Monday protest yet. Showing opposition to the state GOP agenda, the large crowd topped off the legislative session that ended Friday, and reinforced just how angry and motivated the GOP’s political opponents have become since Tea Party nihilists and their mascot, er, governor made North Carolina the poster state for ass-backwardness.
Today’s Moral Monday protesters were particularly riled about what the General Assembly has done to the state’s public education system. And with good reason. Republicans in the legislature moan that they just “didn’t have enough to fund all the educational needs,” as Sen. Jerry Tillman, co-chairman of the Senate Education Appropriations Subcommittee, told the News and Observer. Gee, Jerry, wonder how that happened? Could it possibly be that your party’s tax cuts for the rich and for profitable businesses (90 percent of the individual tax cuts go to the state’s wealthiest 5 percent) – and the $524 million in lost revenue over the next two years they caused – could have picked up the tab for “all the educational needs”? Lucky for you, Jerry, the policy wonks at the N.C. Budget and Tax Center created the handy chart shown below – and they even quoted you!
As the BTC chart makes clear, the $524.4 million in tax cuts for people and companies that don’t need it could have kept the state educational system in reasonable shape, if not build it back to its status as a national model. As John Wilson, who writes a blog for Education Week, put it, “Once known for having the most innovative and progressive public school system in America, North Carolina is now on a trajectory of backwardness.” McCrory came into office pledging to focus on the “Three E’s” – economy, education and efficiency – but he apparently forgot about the middle E. Either that or he was lying. Finally, here’s another chart for you, this one from educator Erica Speaks’ TeachingSpeaksVolumes website. It shows the change in average public school teachers’ salaries in the 50 states and D.C. during the past decade. Guess where North Carolina stands? Read it and weep.
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This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2013.
Fiscal year 2012-13 Fiscal year 2013-14 %Increase Dollar increase
$11,072,499,236 $11,472,304,386 3.61 $399,805,150
Obviously, the above numbers make it is easy to see that there was an increase in spending, not a decrease as so many on the Left want you to believe.
So what are they talking about?
Here is the confusion explained. Every year, the General Assembly’s legislative staff creates a forecast, and they present their opinion of funding and revenue needed for government agencies based on their forecast calculations. This is how many things are done in state government, using forecasts instead of actual numbers. So, the left is claiming there is a decrease in education spending based upon this forecast, not any real spending data. This number is an informational baseline for legislators when deciding how much funding an agency might receive. Another baseline used is the amount of money actually spent the prior year. The Left is only using the forecast number, which is much higher than last year’s spending, and causing them to claim there is a cut in spending for education.
In fact, it is only a baseline. Decisions about real world policy have to be made by our elected representatives and not economists or statisticians on the fiscal research staff. This year those representatives of the people decided to increase spending on education by almost $400 million. That is a fact.
If they don’t get as big of an increase that they want, they call it a cut.
Thanks for your comments, although Garth Vader’s picture of the education budget is incomplete, to say the least. I’m going to let Lindsay Wagner do the talking from here. No, not the actress who played the Bionic Woman, but the education reporter for NC Policy Watch. http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/author/lwag… Here is what she wrote in reply to McCrory’s assertion that the NC education budget was the largest ever:
North Carolina spent $7,714,429,569 on K-12 public education in the 2008 fiscal year budget — the last budget to be adopted prior to the onset of the Great Recession. But when you adjust those numbers for inflation, that amount would be $8,402,393,062 in today’s dollars.
At a total of $7,867,960,649, the 2014 fiscal year budget will spend $535 million less than the 2008 inflation-adjusted budget. And the 2014 budget fails to keep up with the needs of a growing student population. The Office of State Budget and Management estimates that $7,984,924,757 is actually needed to maintain current service levels of education.
[THE TAKEAWAY PARAGRAPH:] So while the 2014 budget would spend more than the previous year’s budget in absolute dollars, the appropriation isn’t enough, even under the estimates of the Governor’s own budget office, to maintain services at FY2013 levels.
Gov. McCrory also repeated a claim he made as he signed his tax reform package into law that teachers making between $40,000 and $45,000 annually will actually get 1% of their earnings back, thanks to tax reform. But according to tables that accompanied the tax reform bill, citizens don’t get a 1% tax break until they have a household income of $250,000.
McCrory also said that teachers are not able to get raises in this budget because of high Medicaid costs. He did not address the fact, however, that state revenue availability was reduced by $684 million over the biennium as the result of tax cut package he signed into law.
We want more we want more we want more we want more. Just give us more and we can fix it. More money is the anwer. More more more more more more more.
It is a fact that giving them more money in the past has NOT fixed any of the problems that they promised it would.
So Mr. Grooms your numbers show that education funding slacked off during the Purdue administration and is now increasing under McCrory’s.
Yes, you are correct, Garth. That is the only factoid that matters, and enrollment growth, revenue giveaways to corporations and the need for teacher raises have nothing whatsoever to do with the situation. Also, up is down, day is night, war is peace, and ignorance, obviously, is bliss.
As usual, when presented with reality, Mr. Grooms dissembles and devolves to spewing infantile insults.
How is run of the mill sarcasm an “infantile insult”? You choose to whine about his response instead of discussing the new information, only reassert that reality is on your side, even when you’re only looking at half the picture. Since there is no substance to your response I have to assume that’s where your knowledge on the subject ends.