If you're interested in North Carolina's budget - and you should be, since you're paying for it - a wonderful new tool is now at your disposal.
"Our State, Our Money: A Citizen's Guide to the North Carolina Budget,'' was released Monday by the North Carolina Progress Board. It's the equivalent of the owner's manual tucked away in the glove compartment of your motor vehicle. It details the nuts and bolts of the budget process, where the money comes from, what it goes for and how those decisions are made.
And it was prepared without taxpayer money. With private donations, a very valuable public service has been performed by the Progress Board, and our hats are off to them.
Some 30,000 copies of the report have been distributed to libraries, institutes of higher learning and North Carolina leaders. The report is also available online.
Tom Covington, the board's executive director, told the Associated Press "What we are trying to do is demystify the ! state budget. The budget has always reminded me of kudzu anyway. The more you cut it, the more it grows.''
This report will remove some of that mystery. Moreover, if people take advantage of it, it could help advance the political dialogue in this state to a whole new level.
Let's take a few of the arguments we normally hear, particularly in an election cycle: we're throwing too much money at the schools; corporate taxes are too high; we should cut spending.
These are sound bites first, arguments second. Taking them one at a time, you can look behind the numbers using the Progress Board report.
We do throw a lot of money at education, around 60 percent of all general funds; total appropriations for public schools, community colleges and universities increased from $6.2 billion in 1996-97 to $8.4 billion in 2002-2003. Digging a little deeper, you can also see that teacher pay has increased, as has the sheer number of students - from around 1,170,0! 00 public school students in 1996 to 1,320,000 in 2003. And an increas e of another 90,000 or so students is expected over the next five years. So yes, we're spending more money. But there are more students and better-paid teachers.
Are corporate taxes too high? Corporate taxes accounted for more than 10 percent of state revenues in 1988. They now account for about three percent. Does that mean corporate taxes are lower? Not necessarily; given the collapse of the textile industry, it might just mean fewer corporations have survived to pay taxes.
Should we cut spending? Here's another argument that politicians love to throw out, without going into specifics. But when you throw that out, the next question has to be: where to cut?
That's the point where you have to get past slogans to the nuts and bolts of the budget. There are fascinating figures, like the fact the state owns more than 12,000 building and structures, or that the state's school bus fleet consumes more than 22 million gallons of fuel a year.
At the end o! f the day, our state budget is a list of our needs, our desires and our priorities. It is a reflection of our values - we spend on things we think worth spending on. If there are things we don't like about the budget, or about the tax structure, we can fight to change them.
But first, we have to know what we're talking about.
On that front, the North Carolina Progress Board has delivered a document we can all count on as a resource. ON THE WEB: http://theprogressboard.org