Raleigh
The home stretch of this year’s political races in North Carolina is just around the corner. Expect to hear gobs of alluring promises and gaggles of self-serving rhetoric.

But a better guide to evaluating incumbents is their voting record. Do they mean what they say? Do their priorities really mirror your own?

For state leaders, this evaluation should begin with the state budget. It is the most important piece of legislation that the governor and members of the General Assembly enact. A governmental budget reflects the real, rather than the rhetorical, priorities of those who fashion it.

So for incumbents seeking re-election in 2004, what would be the significance of their support for this year’s state budget? Let’s make a checklist.

First, the budget recently passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Mike Easley increases spending by more than $1 billion, or about 8 percent. This is far higher than the amount needed to keep up with the service needs related to population growth and rising prices. It is probably higher than personal-income growth in the state.

(There is some quibbling about whether the 8 percent statistic is correct, since part of the new spending reflected fund-shifting rather than truly new expenditures. But if true, that means that the budget grew faster in 2003 than was publicly disclosed.)

Second, while the 2004 budget contained no new tax increases, it did rely on the revenues from past tax increases and likely set the stage for future tax increases. Specifically, North Carolinians will pay about $1 billion more in income, sales, and other taxes in the coming fiscal year than they would have had Easley and the legislature not passed their tax-increase package in 2003. So a vote for the 2004 budget was an implicit endorsement of this policy.

Meanwhile, because about half of the $1 billion spending increase was financed with “temporary” taxes — scheduled to disappear in 2005 — and hundreds of millions more was financed by one-time revenues such as dipping into the Highway Trust Fund, Easley and the legislature left next year’s crop of leaders with a potentially large budget deficit.

Unless revenue growth reaches $1.5 billion or higher, there will be calls for another round of tax increases in 2005, including making the “temporary” sales and income rate hikes permanent and hiking taxes on cigarettes and alcohol.

Third, the 2004 budget made questionable choices. Lawmakers mandated a class-size reduction on local schools without providing funds to cover the full cost. They tossed $2 million more down the Global TransPark rathole and offered $4 million to start digging a new rathole on the other side of the state, what is projected to become a $50 million test track for the motorsports industry.

At a time when North Carolina’s traffic and road conditions are worsening, lawmakers took money out of our road-building fund while agreeing to issue nearly $500 million in new state debt — without bothering to ask the voters for approval — to build projects such as a $25 million “wellness center” at UNC-Asheville, a $25 million “bioinformatics center” at UNC-Charlotte, a $10 million optometry school at UNC-Pembroke, and a $10 million “center for design innovation” at the N.C. School of the Arts.

Oh, and don’t forget the tens of millions of additional dollars taken out of our road-building fund — dollars collected when we buy our cars and fill up our gas tanks — to be used to build rail-transit systems in Charlotte and the Triangle from which few North Carolinians will derive any measurable benefit.

On economic development, the 2004 budget devoted some $420 million to business subsidies, incentives, and other questionable tax breaks. This represents about half of the entire revenue take from North Carolina’s corporate-income tax. So instead of robbing lots of Peters to pay some politically connected Pauls, why not just cut taxes for all businesses, large and small?

These are some of the budgetary decisions our state leaders made this year. The next decision is for voters to make.