The missing numbers in the maddening budget soap opera
Published July 18, 2014
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, July 17, 2014.
These are fascinating times in Raleigh for political junkies and folks in the public policy world, as House and Senate leaders of the same political party trade budget offers back and forth and Governor Pat McCrory weighs in with strong words and photo ops and veto threats. But there is a devastating subplot for public schools just below the surface of all the legislative intrigue.
Most of the current public dispute is about teacher pay, teacher assistants, and Medicaid.
The original Senate budget proposed slashing funding for 7,400 TAs and kicking thousands of vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities off of Medicaid and into the street, all to raise enough revenue to give teachers an 11 percent pay hike if they agreed to give up career status protections.
The original House budget called for a five percent teacher pay raise paid for with higher lottery revenues and deeper cuts to the university system that has been hammered with big funding reductions in the last three years.
Now after several weeks of sometimes testy public and private negotiations, the two sides are closer to a budget deal, but the main issues left to be resolved are the same— teacher pay, teacher assistants and Medicaid.
The Senate’s latest offer would give teachers an eight percent raise and fire only half of the 7,400 teacher assistants, though it would keep the other 3,700 on the job with temporary funding, putting them at risk too. And it would reduce the number of vulnerable people kicked off Medicaid, but several thousand would still be left without coverage.
The House has offered a six percent raise, but House leaders and Governor McCrory continue to resist firing teacher assistants and making the Senate Medicaid cuts. Senate leaders made things worse this week, rolling out a separate Medicaid reform plan that could turn over the program to out-of-state for profit managed care companies, a move blasted by McCrory and much of the state’s medical community.
Those are the highlights of what has been happening in Raleigh in the last several weeks of this unusual legislative session, Republicans fighting among themselves and with their governor, arguing about how much more they will compensate teachers and how to pay for it.
The headlines about the budget negotiations and the rhetoric from the lawmakers involved has created an misleading narrative in Raleigh that even some people who should know better are falling for.
It is true that House leaders and McCrory are currently defending teacher assistants and that Senate leaders are demanding bigger raises for public school teachers, but that doesn’t mean this is a battle over who supports education more.
Hardly. In fact, the opposite is true. Here are two compelling numbers left out of most of the play by play accounts of the back and forth about the budget.
House leaders want to slash $293 million in public school funding from the budget adopted last year, making up some of the difference with revenues from the lottery they used to vehemently oppose. The Senate wants to cut $436 million.
That is the real debate –how much to reduce education funding, not expand it, and that’s because of the massive tax cut for the wealthy passed by lawmakers last year and the next round of tax reductions set to go into effect January 1.
The N.C Budget & Tax Center reports that stopping the next round of tax cuts would save approximately $100 million in the 2015 fiscal year and $300 million in the 2015 calendar year. That would go a long way towards giving teachers a raise without firing teacher assistants or kicking people with dementia off of Medicaid.
The BTC says that while the reported cost of last year’s tax plan is just over $700 million for the 2015 fiscal year, the state actually stands to lose more than $1 billion in state revenue next year when using the latest taxpayer information.
Lawmakers should not fire thousands of teacher assistants or kick people off Medicaid and teachers do deserve a significant raise. But the way to do that is not to slash public school budgets by $300 million. It’s to stop the next round of tax breaks for the wealthy at a minimum, if not reconsider the windfalls they received last year.
Unless House and Senate leaders come to their senses soon, public schools and the students who attend them will lose mightily regardless of which chamber prevails when a budget deal is finally made.
Viewed in that context, this budget soap opera is more maddening than entertaining, and threatens to do more damage to North Carolina as the session finally draws to a close.
http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2014/07/17/the-missing-numbers-in-the-maddening-budget-soap-opera/
July 18, 2014 at 9:11 am
Richard Bunce says:
Chris's typical big government math. Not spending as much as planned next year is a cut even if it is more than this year. Not taxing someone more than planned is giving them a tax cut and taking money from everyone else. When 100% of Chris's income goes to Federal, State, and Local government I will entertain the thought of allowing government to take a little more of mine.
July 19, 2014 at 11:29 am
Norm Kelly says:
Teachers are constantly told by media types, blogs like this one, and generally by leftists/socialists that their pay in NC is at the bottom, like around 46th out of 50 (in reality; but according to the occupier we aren't that bad off. according to the occupier who can not be challenged because of racism, there are 52 states; so NC is actually 46th out of 52. according to the occupier, the beloved leader of socialists around the country, NC just moved up 2 spots on the teacher pay scale! this should make libs feel good!)
When someone is told the same lie often enough, they tend to start believing the lie. Kinda like when K & company told us we'd be able to keep our insurance policy, we'd be able to keep the doctor & hospital of our choice, our premiums would go down, and the VA medical system was a perfect model of how Obamascare would work. Some people started believing those lies, just like teachers are beginning to believe the lie about being 46th.
Every lib who makes this claim, including Chris, knows that it is an absurd comparison at best, an outright lie at worst. They depend on people not doing any research of their own, remaining low-information voters, and simply accepting what they are told as if it were the truth.
A real, honest, true comparison of teacher pay takes more than salary into account. For instance, if a teacher were to be offered a job to move from NC to Boston for a $15,000 annual increase, would this be a wise move? Would the teacher notice an increase in spendable income? Well, if the cost of living in Boston is such that it is lower than the district the teacher is moving from in NC, then yes, it would be a wise move. But if the cost of living in Boston is, say, $25,000 MORE per year, then the teacher took a $10,000 PAY CUT to move to Boston. Any teacher who makes the move voluntarily without knowing the facts is a pretty poor teacher to start with and we probably won't miss this one. Lacking the ability to think logically, draw logical conclusions from available facts, is a person who lacks critical thinking skills and probably shouldn't be in the business of attempting to teach critical thinking skills to our kids.
(the exception being the teacher who moves because a spouse has a job transfer. in that case, however, Chris's premise that we are losing teachers because of pay simply goes away. a spouse job transfer has NOTHING to do with teacher pay in our state, but are these teachers taken into account by the socialist schemers who compare pay across the country?)
It's important that every time socialists bring up the national teacher pay scales that thinking people ask them to compare where our average teacher stands when compared to average teachers in specific areas of the nation! It's time for thinking people, those of us who recognize facts, to start forcing socialist schemers to live in the real world. It's time for people who recognize facts to force socialist schemes into the light; force the proponents of every-increasing government spending & control to take off their rose colored glasses, to stop toking, or whatever they do to force them into the real world, to start recognizing facts. It's time for us to force them to tell the whole story or to tell no story at all. Instead of accepting what these schemers say and let it go, one of us needs to stand up and ask them for the rest of the story.
Like when I heard Bill's show on 850AM this week. Some lib schemer was on the show talking about how poorly we pay our teachers. The caller asked the lib how our teachers compare when cost of living is taken into account. The lib schemer had no clue, but stuck with the 'national average' for income only. To this lib, and I expect most libs, this comparison is meaningless. I postulate that to most libs this comparison is meaningless because it shows their argument as completely bogus and pointless. No one is supposed to show libs as being pointless or bogus. As soon as one of us shows one of them to be irrelevant, we are called racists. It's the lib default position. We still need a few around, just not so many. We need a few reminders, but not ones in control.
