Not worth the wait: GOP state budget once again comes up short

It’s not surprising that a lot of North Carolinians have responded to the state legislature’s recent and ultra-belated passage of a state budget bill with some sense of relief. As with the relentless climate change-fueled drought and heatwave that have plagued the state this year, there’s been a powerful sense in many corners – especially among long-neglected teachers and state employees – that, at some point, things have gotten so bad that any relief is better than nothing.

Unfortunately, as our local meteorologists have been forced to remind us regularly of late, even a handful of welcome cloudbursts will not restore local reservoirs to healthy levels, and so it is right now with the budget. 

Sure, it’s great that lawmakers stuck a crowbar into their collective wallet and finally meted out some modest and overdue raises to long suffering public servants who’ve been treated beyond shabbily for going on two decades, but as even a cursory look at the details of the plan reveals, the budget does precious little to slow the ongoing Republican war on public structures and services.

The plan’s renewed commitment to still more income tax cuts for profitable corporations and wealthy individuals makes sure of that. As analysts at the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center detailed in a damning July 2 report, tax rate cuts – even if phased in at a slower rate than some extremists on the far right had sought – will cost the state tens of billions of dollars over the coming years. 

In other words, the state’s destructive fiscal drought will continue.

But wait, it gets worse. While GOP budget writers ensured that funds for core services will remain chronically drought-stricken for years to come, they were more than happy to build on their longstanding practice of showering undeserved downpours of dollars on an array of far-right causes and propaganda efforts.

Take the badly misnamed School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill and its new $5 million appropriation. Please.

For several years now, this monument to Trumpian doubletalk – you know, the kind in which wholesome sounding words and concepts are attached to efforts that promote corporate authoritarianism and Christian nationalism – has been a top priority of ultra-conservative activists and funders and their allies in Raleigh. 

As NC State Professor Emeritus Michael Schwalbe explained in a blistering and on-the-mark essay for NC Newsline back in 2023, the school’s work has little, if anything, to do with its name. Rather, as its supporters have regularly – if sometimes inadvertently — admitted, it’s merely a tool for funneling large chunks of taxpayer funds to support far right causes. As Schwalbe put it succinctly, “The new school was swathed in dishonesty from the start,” and “Talk of balance and ‘expanding the range of viewpoints’ was thus always rhetorical camouflage, not an honest description of what was afoot… at UNC-Chapel Hill.”

Recent controversies surrounding the school – in which even some conservative voices have raised concerns and a taxpayer funded report on the school has been kept shielded from public view – have only served to make plainer its inherent dishonesty and flaws.

And while $5 million in new money is, admittedly, relatively small potatoes in a $34 billion budget, that comes as little solace to any number of underfunded, threadbare and shuttered programs and departments across the UNC system whose leaders have watched helplessly in recent years as talented faculty members have been flat-out defunded and/or lured away to better-paying institutions in other states. The fact that the conservative school has been in a position to lure new students with special scholarships – what one history professor on campus told The New York Times amounts to a kind of bribery — only heightens the injustice of the situation.

But, of course, as noted, the practice of funneling cash to favored but bogus right-wing entities at the expense of truly deserving public programs has long been a tried-and-true Republican budgeting technique in many areas.

See, for example, the latest $11-plus billion cash dump that the budget will give to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” – private institutions that often masquerade as health providers, but that in fact merely serve as anti-abortion propaganda shops and conduits for funneling money to conservative political causes.

And then there is the new round of dollars, employees and power the budget bestows upon the legislature’s go-to right-wing hatchet man – Auditor Dave Boliek – as he and they continue to transform the office of the state’s accountant into a powerful, multi-purpose force never contemplated by the state’s constitution.

And the list goes on. The budget gifts $750,000 to the pro-school privatization organization, Parents for Educational Freedom even as it slashes funding for civil legal aid programs that sometimes have the temerity to represent poor clients when they’re harmed by powerful interests like landlords and big agriculture growers.

In short, the new budget may have been months/years in the making, but in the end, it’s just the latest secretly crafted installment in what’s become a very familiar and maddening pattern. Would that the politicians behind it had the courage to engage in open and transparent debate and negotiations over its numerous controversial details.