Spin won't fix our schools or build our economy

Published March 24, 2017

[caption id="attachment_3452" align="alignleft" width="150"] Senator Phil Berger[/caption]

Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, March 22, 2017.

Political fact-spinning isn't necessarily one of the dark arts, although our new president has firmly shoved the tactic in that direction.

But mostly, we expect politicians to spin the facts in the way that best serves their cause and enhances their image. In many cases, that involves taking some small liberties with reality and maybe even telling a fib or two. It's up to the rest of us to listen critically and sift through the facts to find the truth.

But even before Donald Trump appeared on the national political scene, the increasingly coarse and nasty political dialogue and the recasting of politics as a permanent standoff led to the rise of fact-checking groups, many of them nonpartisan. We're fortunate to have one of them here in North Carolina, regularly fact-checking statements made by both Democratic and Republican politicians.

That includes state Senate leader Phil Berger, who recently boasted that teacher pay has increased by 15 percent in the past three years. PolitiFact NC analyzed the numbers and concluded that teacher pay has actually grown by 10.8 percent in the past three years and added that Berger didn't account for the rest of the time that Republicans have run the General Assembly — six years in all. For the GOP's first three years at the legislative helm, teacher pay actually declined. The real average for the party in charge is in the single digits.

Berger, who gave his party's response to Gov. Roy Cooper's State of the State speech last week, has also tried to continue stumping for former Gov. Pat McCrory's vaunted "Carolina Comeback," citing the creation of half a million jobs in this state since recession recovery began. Economists who've looked at that claim say that while the growth is welcome, it's nothing spectacular, that our economic growth has largely kept pace with the nation's 2 percent annual expansion since the recession — but little more than that. As economic recoveries go, North Carolina's is average.

Berger has cited this state's cuts in its tax rates as the reason for expansion, but we may have done just as well without those cuts, pulled along by the national economy.

Granted, even with the tax cuts, we've got better than a half-billion-dollar revenue surplus in this fiscal year, and that's a good thing. But Republican initiatives to further cut the tax rates may prevent our restoring education funding to its pre-recession levels. Gov. Roy Cooper has set a goal of getting teacher pay and education funding back to the mid-point among the states. Both are still in the bottom fifth today.

Worse, the economic expansion we've seen is largely confined to the Triangle and Charlotte and a few other smaller metro areas. There's a lot of work to be done before the same growth happens in small cities and in our rural areas. The state needs to invest in those places, improving transportation networks, expanding job training and rolling out true high-speed Internet service to them. We need to rekindle some incentives programs too, including the one for the film industry that once made us "Hollywood East," a title we relinquished to our neighbors in Georgia.

In short, it's time for our elected leaders to put the brakes on their spinning and put some real money where their mouth is. We all want this to be the most successful state in the South, but we can't get there by just making it up.

http://www.fayobserver.com/opinion/20170322/our-view-spin-wont-fix-our-schools-or-build-our-economy

March 24, 2017 at 10:07 am
bruce stanley says:

Fayetteville Observer has it backwards. National economy bad. That's why Trump got elected. NC economy good, much better than national economy. See attached data.

https://www.nccommerce.com/Portals/0/Research/Industry%20Reports/North-Carolina-Economic-Facts.pdf