Government is nothing more than a social contract. An essential function of government is to provide infrastructure for the common good that is too costly, too big or impractical for individuals to undertake themselves. A look at our history reveals that public infrastructure has been funded through bonds, taxes, tolls and the lottery.

We boast the opening of the first public university in 1795, financed in part by a lottery. With stagnation following the Revolution, tolls funded the building of more than 500 miles of plank roads. In 1856, the North Carolina railroad opened with 233 miles of track between Charlotte and Goldsboro, with two-thirds funding from the state and one-third from private investment.

Skip to 1921. Governor Cameron Morrison, “the Good Roads Governor,” convinced the legislature, and later the public, to vote passage of a 50 million dollar road bond issue to build 5,500 miles of roads. Governor Kerr Scott trumped him in 1949, leading passage of 200 million dollars in road bonds for farm-to-market roads. Both were huge and daring investments for those days. But the granddaddy of all North Carolina infrastructure programs was the 3.1 billion dollar higher education bond package passed in 2000.

Swings in the economy and changes in leadership have resulted in North Carolina doing little to maintain our public infrastructure, meanwhile needs grow with more than 100,000 new residents each year. The American Society of Civil Engineers will shortly release a report card of the condition of infrastructure in our state and it promises to be damning. If you started a spreadsheet of the deferred maintenance and growing infrastructure needs in transportation, water and sewer, public buildings like schools, communications, energy and main street revitalization you could easily total upwards of 100 billion dollars.

If my mentor, former State Treasurer Harlan Boyles, were still in office he would boldly state that now is the time for North Carolina to undertake a major public infrastructure improvement campaign. For starters, our unemployment rate is still 8.9 percent and, while dropping a little, there are far too many out of work. We’re told that every billion dollars spent in construction creates 28,000 jobs.

We have not seen in our history interest rates as low as today and bond financing, especially for states like ours with a Triple-A credit rating, has never been cheaper. We are still considered a low-debt state by rating agencies. Construction costs are also extremely attractive. Investing in public infrastructure will get NC moving forward, significantly lowering our unemployment rate while catching up to and investing in the public infrastructure our state needs in the near term.

The biggest opposition to such a campaign centers on how we will pay for these investments. By law debt service is the first expenditure our legislature must appropriate and our lawmakers would need to find some, but not all the money from economy in government. The new jobs created would ripple throughout our economy with resulting revenues through income, sales and other taxes.

Are we less bold and confident in our state’s future than those in our past who started the first public university or who saw the importance of roads, schools, water systems and other public infrastructure? It is time to get NC Moving Forward. Join the campaign.

Transcript of Tom Campbell’s Speech:

It was the Spanish philosopher Jorge Santyana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

So before we begin any discussion about public infrastructure in North Carolina let us examine our past. In researching the subject I learned that our infrastructure has been funded by lotteries, tolls and taxes.

We proudly boast that North Carolina opened the first public university in the nation in 1795, but did you know the first construction was financed by a lottery? North Carolina was never a state of great wealth, and our yeoman ancestors weren’t fond of paying taxes, so alternative funding sources were needed.

Following the economic stagnation our state experienced following the Revolutionary War, people saw the need for better ways to move goods and services across the state and a series of plank roads was constructed. During the 1850’s, we built about 500 miles of these plank roads and paid for them by charging tolls. Typically, one rider on horseback paid half a cent a mile, while a teamster with two horses paid two cents a mile. Three horses paid three cents and a team of six paid four cents per mile.

During this same time railroads became the faster and better way to haul freight and passengers and, in 1848 the General Assembly passed authorizing legislation for the North Carolina Railroad, which formally opened in 1856 with a 233-mile track between Charlotte and Goldsboro. Taxpayers owned two-thirds of the company with private investors owning one-third. I have hanging in my office a 1,000 dollar coupon bond signed by Governor William Holden, sold to help pay for the western portion of the railroad. Unfortunately, there was corruption that led to Holden’s impeachment and the subsequent bankrupting of the western railroad, but that’s another story for another day.

In 1839, the legislature passed the North Carolina Public School Act and a resolution for a referendum to modify the constitution. It passed in all but seven counties. The legislature had previously established a literary fund consisting of bank stocks, proceeds from sales of state land, dividends, license fees, taxes and money from the federal government to help in funding but it was many years before public schools were actually constructed.

Skip to 1921. Cameron Morrison was our governor and half his inaugural address focused on roads. He became known as the “Good Roads Governor,” urging the legislature to pass and the public to approve a 50 million dollar bond package to build 5,500 miles of roads. It was funded by automobile and gasoline taxes. In 1923, we passed another 15 million dollars in road bonds. Morrison also got the legislature to approve 20 million dollars in bonds for improvements for higher education and the state’s charitable institutions.

In 1949, Governor Kerr Scott said he was going to build farm to market roads and get us out of the mud, so we approved an unprecedented 200 million dollar road bond project. And of course, the granddaddy of all North Carolina bond projects was the November 2000 passage of the 3.1 billion dollar higher education bond package.

We could talk about the creation of The Research Triangle Park and the NC Biotechnology Center that greatly accelerated our economic growth, and while it is always difficult to generalize, I think it is fair to say that during times when we were the “Rip Van Winkle” state we were not addressing our public infrastructure needs. And during those times when we were being hailed as the “Dixie Dynamo” it was partially due to our investments in infrastructure. We have a history of using bonds, taxes, tolls and lotteries to build airports, water and sewer systems, public parks, help with industrial projects and build hospitals, lots and lots of schools and other buildings.

Now that we have remembered the past, let’s look at the present and peek ahead to the future.

Even in this recessionary period, North Carolina is growing at the rate of about 100,000 people per year. The Office of State Budget and Management projects that by the year 2030 we will grow from our present population of 9.6 million people to some 11.6 million and will have the 8th largest population in the nation.

Since that 2000 Higher Education Bond package we have done practically nothing to address our growing needs to upgrade or expand our public infrastructure.

The American Society for Civil Engineers periodically releases a report card for public infrastructure. In their 2009 update they graded our state a D+ on airports, a C- for bridges, a D for dams, B- for drinking water, C for rail, D- for roads, C- for schools, C- for storm water, C+ for wastewater. A new report card will be released on March 19th rating our national infrastructure, with the new state report card expected in May and since we haven’t done much since the last report we can only suspect North Carolina’s report card grades will be even lower.

What does all this mean in terms of dollars?

• To bring our airports to good or excellent we need to spend half a billion dollars.
• 31 percent of our bridges are considered deficient, requiring approximately 8 billion to fix or replace.
• Another half billion dollars is needed for dams.
• The North Carolina Rural Center, in its Water 2020 report, estimated the cost of repairing and upgrading our water systems at 17 billion dollars.
• Governor Easley’s blue-ribbon Transportation study estimated we needed to spend at least 29 billion on roads over the next 20 years to repair and meet the need for new roads.
• Almost 15 percent of our public school students are housed in mobile classrooms and 46 percent of current school facilities need renovation.
• A recent FCC report shows us tied with Mississippi at the bottom of states with broadband connections.
• We’ve got main streets in rural communities across the state that desperately need revitalization if those communities have any chance of surviving.
• And we haven’t addressed higher education, hospitals, courthouses, jails, public parks, energy or other infrastructure.

Mathematics wasn’t one of my best subjects in school, but even I can easily add up to 100 billion dollars in North Carolina infrastructure needs. That number is growing every single year and we aren’t doing anything to address these needs. Much of our public infrastructure was built 30 to 50 years ago.

If anything we are getting further behind. Here is but one example. In 1989, we approved the North Carolina Highway Trust Fund to improve primary transportation corridors within the state and build loops around seven metropolitan areas. It was estimated to cost 8 billion dollars and take 13 years to complete, but in 1998, the State Auditor said it would require 23 additional years and almost 12 billion more dollars to complete. We capped the gas tax, the primary source of revenue, our vehicles are more fuel efficient, meaning we are buying less gas. Still, we have the highest gas taxes in the Southeastern. The funding mechanism we have clearly isn’t working…but we aren’t doing anything about it.

Here’s another. 70 percent of our state’s water systems are municipally owned and most were built 40 years ago. We have the highest number of small water systems of any state in the nation. 138 of the 214 water systems in towns of fewer than 2,500 are losing money and unable to properly maintain their systems. Few of our water systems are charging the actual costs of service. We have a public health threat facing us if we don’t act. We haven’t started any new large water reservoirs to meet our growth needs in more than 30 years…which is about the length of time it takes to bring one online. As stated earlier, funds needed to repair and expand water systems are projected to be greater than 17 billion dollars. And this doesn’t include a discussion on waste water and storm water treatment…which also need a lot of work.

Now maybe you want to argue with the math. Maybe you don’t think we need 100 billion dollars in infrastructure improvements. Maybe you think the number is 50 billion… or 25 billion….you pick the number. The point is that the need is greater than we can meet all at one time…but whatever the number is it is growing daily because we aren’t doing anything to reduce the need.

So far, I suspect I’ve been preaching to the choir. Most folks will agree that we have a big need to improve North Carolina’s public infrastructure. What we haven’t reached agreement on, and what I call the 100 billion dollar question, is how are we going to pay for these improvements?

Government is nothing more than a social contract among the citizens of a town, a state or a nation. And our society has agreed that one of the public purposes of government is to provide infrastructure…So unless we want to dissolve that social contract, which, by the way, I believe would create chaos, we need to figure out a way to get about the job of rebuilding and expanding our public infrastructure.

If my former boss, the late State Treasurer Harlan Boyles, was around today he would telling anyone who would listen that now is the time for our state to engage in a major public infrastructure building and renovation campaign. And he would say we should buy at today’s costs for tomorrow’s future needs. Those of you who remember Harlan will also remember he was a fiscal conservative, but he was also a realist who knew when it was time to act.

Here is why he would say we need to sell bonds to finance infrastructure improvements. We have historically low interest rates and governments like the state of North Carolina, that have Triple-A credit ratings can borrow money as cheaply as any of us can remember. We currently owe about 7.1 billion dollars of state debt and the major credit rating agencies consider us a low debt state. Construction costs are still very reasonable. We will likely never have a better time to build than this moment.

We have the 5th highest unemployment rate in the nation and have been stuck in that position for many months. The recovery being experienced in other states has yet to manifest itself firmly here in North Carolina. Ask one of our citizens in the I-85 Piedmont crescent how things are today and he or she will say they are bad but getting better. Ask a person east of I-95 and they will report things are bad and getting desperate. Ask a person in the mountains and they will say things are about the same…times were never real good and they haven’t changed.

A multi-billion dollar public infrastructure building and renovation program would put tens of thousands of people to work…we’ve heard it estimated that for every billion dollars in construction money we spend we will create 28,000 new jobs.

If this is sounding like a not-so-subtle sales pitch I would say you are hearing me clearly. If properly designed and enacted, a public infrastructure building program would lower our unemployment rate while also updating our public infrastructure.

Now I know there will be some who say how are we going to pay for all this? We pay for it with improved state government efficiency, by reducing the costs of state government and also through the growth this program will surely provide. Doesn’t that sound like a win-win solution?

The truth we don’t want to hear is that we are staring down the barrel of an infrastructure crisis in our state. Our history demonstrates all too clearly that when we stepped up to our responsibility and improved our infrastructure our economy prospered and when refused to provide that infrastructure our economy and the health of our people languished. Are we, as Santyana told us condemned to repeat that history?

I want to close with a reminder of Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of physics. Newton’s first law states that an object at rest remains at rest until acted upon by force. Folks, our public infrastructure is at rest and will stay that way unless we do something to change it.

Recently I spoke to about 250 people at the NC Farm Bureau Leadership Conference and asked how many of them would support a public infrastructure bond referendum. Fewer than 5 percent raised their hands. Friends, we need to conduct a massive education campaign to let our citizens know the need for infrastructure and I want to respectfully ask you to get involved with anyone who will listen. Now is the time for action. We need to get in touch with all our elected officials, legislators and our governor and tell them that now is the time to get North Carolina Moving Forward. They need encouragement, they need to know there is public support, that this is important and that we expect them to act.

A new campaign will be launched later this year called NC Moving Forward, and all of us need to get involved because we all have a stake in North Carolina’s future. If that future is to be positive, vibrant, healthy and prosperous, we must act to improve our infrastructure…and there is no better time than right now. Friends it is our time to answer the 100 billion dollar question.

Remember the TV ad with the little old lady holding up a burger and asking, “Where’s the Beef?”

Many now are asking, “Where’s the Sequestration Beef?”

It matters not where the idea came from but during the debt-ceiling impasse of 2011 our leaders created what they considered a “poison pill” that would force sensible leaders to resolve our country’s fiscal problems. It required one trillion dollars in automatic federal budget cuts over a nine-year period, half of which would come from defense spending, if no agreement could be reached by March 1 of this year. The term for these automatic cuts is sequestration.

Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain came to North Carolina last summer as part of a national barnstorming tour, warning us of the “doomsday” we would face if sequestration took effect. President Obama has recently sung the same tune. Granted, we haven’t felt the full effects from sequestration yet, but most of us are coming to realize this “Chicken Little, sky is falling” rhetoric is largely politics.

We are not naïve and don’t want to trivialize the impact. North Carolinians are going to feel some effects.  Economists estimate that 4.5 percent of our 425 billion dollar gross state product comes as a result of federal spending. With the large military presence in Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Goldsboro, Havelock and Elizabeth City there are large numbers of military and civilian paychecks; some in the civilian ranks are likely to experience furloughs or job cuts, hurting them and our state. There is good news and bad news in the fact that we don’t have many military contractors, like weapons or aircraft manufacturers, in our state, so cuts there won’t be devastating. Federal research grants to universities and other education funding will see cuts, as will Medicare reimbursements to doctors and hospitals be cut two percent. We will be affected.

During this Great Recession many of us have had to cut our family spending and most acknowledge the imbalance in federal spending and debt vis-à-vis our revenues. Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, reports we spend more on defense than the next twenty nations in the world combined, an amount that needs to be trimmed. And since about two-thirds of federal spending consists of entitlements like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security we acknowledge reforms are needed in these areas. But we hope our leaders in Washington would be willing to prioritize and save from severe cuts government functions like TSA security, air traffic controllers, meat inspectors and other vital services. Surely those interested in the common good can find solutions. Unfortunately, partisan politics trumps common sense in today’s Washington, a place once described as 26 square miles surrounded by reality.

We admired the television interview with a bar owner in Fayetteville, who admitted sequestration would affect his business, quickly adding he had endured troop deployments that took away half the soldiers from his town at one time and he would somehow survive sequestration.

We live in a time when politicians try to achieve agendas through fear tactics and so far it appears that might be true with sequestration. There will be an impact to North Carolina but we have survived poor governance, natural disasters, crop failures, wars and any number of other problems and we can survive sequestration.

Paul Harvey’s unmistakable voice grabbed our attention in his Super Bowl tribute to America’s farmers. Until the turn of the twentieth century most Americans lived on the family farm, but today most of us are three or four generations removed from that farm. So let us hear what Harvey used to call “the rest of the story.

Any typical workday one in five North Carolinians, about 638,000 of us, go to work in agriculture or agribusiness, generating some 71.6 billion of our 425 billion dollar gross state product. Twenty years ago a farmer grew enough food to support 53 people; today that number is 200 and needs to double by 2050 to meet population growth. If we are to have sufficient food, fiber and forest products agriculture must up its game.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau held its Leadership Conference in Raleigh this week to celebrate the successes and discuss the challenges for this industry that is the number one contributor to our state’s economy. Chief among the challenges is a shortage of labor. Native-born workers are not willing to endure the weather and hard work harvesting crops for 10.76 per hour, so immigrants are essential. Mechanization has helped relieve labor needs but a machine doesn’t know when a berry, melon or apple is ripe for picking. Farm Bureau’s Larry Wooten says we are either going to import our workers or import our food, making the immigration debate in Washington and Raleigh critical to the future of agriculture.

Water is also essential in the production of crops, livestock, aquaculture and ornamentals. Uncertain weather conditions have forced growers to rely more heavily on large irrigation systems for crops that require a lot of water. The NC Rural Center’s Water 2020 report says our state needs to invest in excess of 30 billion dollars in water infrastructure. But our transportation network is also a major concern. Our roads, rails and ports are not being maintained and upgraded to ensure efficient farm to market delivery. Neither is our energy infrastructure expanding sufficiently to guarantee an available and affordable supply.

Government regulation and tax policies are growing concerns in agribusiness. Chief among tax concerns is the estate tax. Most farmers are “land poor,” requiring large acreage to produce their crops. When the farmer dies the tax on those estates can force many families to sell their farms to pay estate taxes. Due to improvements in mechanization and technology our education system needs to improve vocational and technical training.

But farmers are the biggest optimists on the planet and panelists at the Leadership Conference expressed optimism for farming’s future in North Carolina. We have one of the great research and teaching centers in the nation at NC State and their innovations are leading to new products, better production methods and a new generation of leaders. Research at RTP is also a major contributor, especially as our biotech industry expands. Food processors are growing within our state and farmers are diversifying their crops in step with cultural changes in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Paul Harvey’s description of a farmer brought nostalgic memories but also calls us to understand how critical farmers are to our future. When you sit down to your next meal think about it.

Action NC, an organization that describes itself as a “grassroots community organization that empowers low to moderate-income communities to take action and win victories on issues of concern to our communities,” has issued a challenge to Governor Pat McCrory to try to live on the $350 per week the legislature is proposing for unemployment benefits.

The challenge got a lot of media attention,  but didn’t get much media scrutiny. The legislature is set to pass reductions in the amount of unemployment benefits to $350 per week. Why didn’t any media types ask how that compares to North Carolina’s minimum wage, which is $7.25 per hour.

A person working a minimum wage job 40 hours per week doesn’t earn but $290 per week. We have thousands who work in fast food, retail and other jobs at the minimum. Where is the fairness in a person who is actually working earning less than a person who is unemployed? And what is the incentive for a person to take a job that only pays $290 when they can draw unemployment at $350.00 per week?

As we said last week on NC SPIN, many forget that the unemployment benefit was meant to be a safety net, not a living wage. It was meant to be a bridge to help people while they find work, not a disincentive to working. We can debate whether minimum wage is sufficient but the real discussion needs to be centered around what we can do to help incentivize small businesses, the ones that create most of the new jobs in our state, to create jobs so that our people don’t have to depend on unemployment.

Our 9.2 percent unemployment rate is too high but challenging our governor to live on unemployment shouldn’t be the point.  Let’s remember to keep the main thing the main thing.

With respect to our legislators the current talk of a tax reform plan makes about as much sense as hopping in a car and striking out to California without a GPS or road map. No doubt our tax codes are antiquated and need reform but before settling on categories and rates to tax let’s take the time to develop a comprehensive plan for our state.

You can’t hit a target you don’t have and North Carolina hasn’t had an economic development plan for so long most of us can’t even remember one. The same is true for infrastructure. And nobody can question that we just respond to one crisis after another regarding health and human services or education, the two categories that consume eighty percent of our state’s general fund expenditures.

What do we want North Carolina’s economy to be ten years from now? What is the ideal mix of jobs we want from agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, biotech, construction or other economic sectors? What education or skills must workers have in order to get and keep these jobs? What must our public schools, community colleges and universities be teaching to ensure students have the skills they need and what are our priorities for government? What kind of transportation system will be needed to convey goods, services and people throughout our state? Wouldn’t we be well served to know these answers before reforming our tax code?

In the summer of 1930, when this state was in the throes of The Great Depression, Governor O. Max Gardner recognized the need for having a plan and hired The Brookings Institution to “promote increased efficiency and economy in the conduct of the governmental affairs of the State.” The resulting plan helped lift us out of the depression. We don’t need a Washington think-tank today and we certainly aren’t in quite so desperate a financial condition as the one Gardner inherited. We’ve got some of the best educators, business people, public policy think tanks, religious and civic minds to be found but the need for a plan is just as critical.

The time is right. North Carolina is slowly recovering from The Great Recession and government revenues, while not rosy are stable enough to allow us some breathing room to develop a plan. We’ve got a new leadership team in place in state government and great talent at our disposal. Now would be a perfect time to bring together the best brains and charge them to develop The North Carolina Plan, a top to bottom approach to charting the future for our state. To make sure we come out with a sound practical plan the planning group should include all political parties and philosophies, all disciplines, as well as all geographic and demographic sectors. Can’t you just imagine how exciting it would be to have our best and brightest creating comprehensive plans for our future?

Development of such a plan wouldn’t take years. With proper encouragement and support we should be able to develop strategies in a matter of months and the time spent planning would surely pay huge dividends for decades to come. Let us encourage our leaders to take the time to plan the work ahead; then we can work the plan, which certainly must include fixing our tax code.

The drumbeat for tax reform in 2013 is growing louder with each passing day, but ask those beating the drums what they mean by reform and you get very different answers.

For some, tax reform means closing loopholes; others think it is dramatically cutting or even eliminating personal and/or corporate income taxes. Some advocate the taxing of services. But there is one common theme, once articulated by the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long: “Don’t tax him, don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.” Everyone wants to maintain or even reduce the amount they pay, shifting taxes to someone else.

We’ve had many blue ribbon studies on the subject but none of them accomplished much. When you ask the wrong questions you always get the wrong answers.  These are serious decisions that require our best thinking and we grow concerned when we hear, as we have recently heard, politicians arbitrarily say they are going to cut personal income taxes by one-half and eliminate corporate income taxes altogether. Perhaps that is the right thing to do but it is a decision to be made only after careful deliberation of our overall tax philosophy.

There is a growing sentiment on both the national and state levels that we should eliminate the income tax and move to a consumption or use tax. Personal and corporate income taxes account for roughly 55 percent of the almost 20 billion dollars North Carolina receives in General Fund revenues. If we do keep the income tax should it contribute 55 percent of the total revenue or should it be less? Sales and use taxes account for 27 percent, franchise taxes add another 3 percent and almost 10 percent consists of licenses and other fees. What is the right mix for these categories? We should also be asking whether we want to continue to mirror federal tax codes or, as some propose, should we uncouple them to reflect our own philosophy?

Governor McCrory has said he wants to close the loopholes or “tax expenditures,” adding, “Let me send all of you a message because this is not going to be an easy battle with an easy solution. It’s going to step on everyone’s toes a little bit.” Those loopholes are expenditures estimated to amount to 9 billion dollars, with about half of that amount coming from standard and itemized income tax deductions and exemptions on income tax, government retirement income, prescription drugs, sales taxes on groceries and the like. They benefit most every man, woman and child. The rest will affect business and special interest groups who have already hired an army of lobbyists and are geared up to preserve and protect their positions.

My former boss and mentor, the late State Treasurer Harlan Boyles, speculated that the only way significant reforms would be accomplished was to deputize a select group to craft new tax codes and then bring the plan to both houses of the legislature for a straight up or down vote, meaning no amendments or changes could be made, something unlikely to happen.

We need significant tax reform. What we may get could be ugly and unproductive. This is a time for statesmen to do the right thing for our state. Any changes could be in place many years.

Everyone wants to avoid the proverbial fiscal cliff that threatens us on January 1, but nobody wants to make any sacrifices to prevent it. That is totally unrealistic, as some of North Carolina’s leaders pointed out at Tuesday’s “Fix the Debt” coalition press conference.

Former Glaxo CEO Bob Ingram, co-chair of the North Carolina effort, said this fiscal crisis is a result of the economic downturn, growing healthcare costs, an aging population and irresponsible policy choices by both parties, saying a successful fix must be comprehensive, bi-partisan and one in which “everyone gives up something they like for the country they love.” Failure to do so will plunge us into another recession, the economy will shrink as much as four percent in the first quarter of next year, unemployment will soar and, according to Moody’s, our Triple-A credit rating will be jeopardized. More importantly, we will face the same fate as European nations that ignored or took too little action to solve their financial problems and are today in desperate straits. Ingram also warned against focusing only on the budget deficit, saying the greater urgency is the federal debt, now at the highest share of our economy since World War II.

Former governors Jim Hunt and Jim Holshouser concurred on the immediacy for this campaign. Jim Holshouser remarked that Republicans and Democrats need to learn to work together again, saying that he and Hunt had demonstrated it could be done “without bringing down bolts of lightning on them.” He also acknowledged this will be painful, admitting he didn’t like any of the options being discussed, but quickly adding that unless our leaders work together to find the lesser of the evils they will have failed this nation and themselves.

Jim Hunt reminded us that during World War II everyone made sacrifices. Rationing, shortages and human sacrifices were the norm as we united to fight for freedom for that generation and those to come. Today’s fiscal crisis is equally threatening and we are foolish to think we can overcome it without pain and sacrifice. Those alive during World War II remember the size and magnitude of that effort. We did whatever was needed to win. We must once again “go big,” as Hunt aptly put it. We cannot temporize or minimize this threat. The four-term governor said he had no polling data but strongly believed North Carolinians supported the efforts of the coalition.

North Carolina’s Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson were the genesis of this grassroots campaign. The Simpson-Bowles Commission studied our fiscal crisis exhaustively and arrived at solutions few liked but a growing number agree are necessary. And lest you believe this is a top-down problem to be addressed only by the president and congress the coalition, at their www.fixthedebt.org, site, has a toolkit of options we as citizens can undertake to grow this movement from a grass roots level to Capitol Hill and the White House.

It makes no difference who or what created today’s fiscal problems. This is our crisis for our time and just as previous generations stood up to the challenges of their day so must we meet and resolve today’s fiscal problems, proving to future generations our desire to be free, independent and prosperous.

A man went into a bank and handed the teller a note demanding one dollar and health care. He wasn’t crazy. He was desperate. The robber had been employed for a number of years until he got laid off due to The Great Recession. He cut his expenses and was getting by as a part-time clerk at a convenience store, but his health started failing and he couldn’t lift the stock onto shelves. He got fired. He could move in with his sister, but she couldn’t afford to pay for his health care any more than he could.

So he decided to rob a bank. Bank robbery, he knew, was a felony and he figured he would be sent to jail, the only place where he was certain to receive the health care he needed without having to pay for it.  At trial he told the judge that if his sentence was too light he would keep robbing banks until he got sufficient jail time. Farfetched? The story is true, reported in a startling book called, “Greedy Bastards,” by Dylan Ratigan.

This sluggish economy is creating a permanent underclass, many of whom were formerly middle class. For the third month in a row North Carolina’s unemployment rate was stuck at 9.4 percent, fourth highest in the nation. Most agree this number is actually higher because it doesn’t reflect the large number who have given up and aren’t even registered with the Employment Security Commission.

We’ve listened to the political rhetoric about job creation being our number one priority, but so far there’s more talk than action. The private sector clearly isn’t creating enough new jobs, even though we are told corporate treasuries are at all time highs. In the public sector budget and job cuts are the order of the day. Wall Street has more ups and downs than a pogo stick. The fundamental problem is we don’t have confidence in our economy.

North Carolina has been in recession most of this past decade and has lost more than 300,000 jobs since 2007, suffering more than most states. What we are doing is obviously not working to stimulate our economy. Doing little or nothing won’t make things better. It’s time to try something different, something guaranteed to put people to work. And yes, state government must have a role to play in that plan.

We propose a statewide capital improvement plan, selling tax-exempt bonds. Our plan would be targeted to public infrastructure improvement and would create thousands of jobs if designed and overseen by a non-partisan group. Our aging public infrastructure doesn’t need help. Several years ago the Society of Civil Engineers estimated it would require more than 40 billion dollars to build or repair the needed roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, airports, schools and other public buildings in our state. With North Carolina’s Triple-A credit rating we could easily borrow the money at historically low rates and we can handle the debt load. Job creation, infrastructure improvement and an economic boost – a win-win plan.

It’s time politicians started acting like leaders and demonstrated some confidence in our state and its people. We need to jump-start the economy. Let’s go to work. We can do this.