Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. It's Tuesday, It's noon, and that means we
speak with Andrew Dunn. He is a publisher over at
long Leaf Politics longleafpol dot com and a contributing columnist
to The Charlotte Observer. Andrew, how are you, sir?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'm fantastic.
Speaker 3: How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm not quite fantastic, but I'm okay. So that's good.
So you've got a bunch of pieces up at long
Leaf Politics and over at the Charlotte Observer as well.
So let's start there. At the paper. You've got a
piece that public I guess yesterday two new incidents show
why North Carolina should not let schools keep secrets, and
one of them is this rgerie Kel High School principal
who was suspended with pay back on May second. And
then there's the Randolph Middle School principal who was also suspended,
although it also seems like it may be related to
her being attacked by a parent. So that's like, that's
a rough day. You get suspended with pay but also
strangled in your office by an angry parent. So what
did this prompt that? What? These two cases rather prompted
your op ed? But you're using it to, as we
always like to see, offer a solution here for the
public and parents who don't actually know why these two
principles were suspended.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And both of those incidents came to light
within hours of each other, really, and they're very similar.
You know, the principles essentially go missing. Parents eventually start
asking what's going on. The school sends out a note
saying that they're away from some time, and you know,
to their credit. Journalists in the city, you know, ask
cms put in public records requests. But all they're able
to find out is that they were suspended. There's no
details on why, for how long, anything like that. And
when you dig into it, it's because the state public
records law doesn't require anything other than that, all the
public is entitled to know is that someone was suspended,
not why. And that's actually fairly unusual when you look
around the country. You know, every state has its own
public records laws, and most of them require a little
bit more detail, you know, to at least give the
general reasons or length of time for the suspension. And
so it'd be a relatively easy fix for the General
Assembly to go in and update public records laws just
to re w are a little more transparency there. You know,
in my mind, you know, I've got four kids, several
of them at CMS, and you know, principles really do matter.
I mean, they're they're public officials that are highly visible,
you know, really influential in a school, and you know,
parents really just deserve to know what's going on with them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I thought you had a really good line where
you say it's more than just communication, it's about accountability.
It's about whether families are treated as partners or bystanders
in public education. And that is like that is I
think sort of the dividing line in where a lot
of conservatives that really kind of blew up during the pandemic,
where parents started pushing back on some of the stuff
saying well, well, well wait a minute. You know, this
is my kid and I want to be informed of
what it is that you're teaching them. And you saw
a lot of pushback from school systems that you know,
want to just kind of keep the parents at arm's length.
And you're not part of the your kids education when
they're in the school, and so you don't get a
say you don't need to know this stuff, we'll take
care of it all. And what are the chances then
that you could get the General Assembly to change this
law because you mentioned this Government Transparency Act of twenty
twenty five and it did not make the crossover deadline.
So what you're thinking gutting stuff instead? Like you you
find a bill that's not going anywhere and you rip
out the language and insert some other language.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's always possible. It could even be part
of the budget bill.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: There if the General Assembly wants to do something, they
tend to find a way to do it. True, you know,
to your point earlier, you know the General Assembly has
done a lot a lot of good work around you know,
parental rights. You know, the Parents Bill of Rights I
was a big proponent of that passed a year or
two ago. That's given parents a lot more visibility into
what's going on at their kids' school. And this is
you know, it's related, it's not obviously related. And that's
why I wanted to write the op ed is to
kind of, you know, to tie those two things together.
Speaker 1: Let's shift gears and look at the election twenty twenty six,
because it's never too early to start looking a year
ahead for the campaigns. And Justice Anita Earles is going
to be on the ballot. She is one of two Democrats.
Alison Riggs just fought that long fight with Jefferson Griffin,
the Republican challenger. She maintains her seat on the Supreme Court.
And Anita Earls is the other Democrat appointed, well, she
was appointed initially, she did win her election, but she's
going to be up for reelection next year. And you
are really looking forward to this race, I take it.
Speaker 2: No, I am absolutely dreading it.
Speaker 3: And you know the.
Speaker 2: Reason why I wrote that piece is we're just you know,
Anita Earl. Justice Earls is starting to hit the stump speeches.
You know, she had an event in Durham where she
posted some footage of and you know, her messaging is
exactly what you would think it would be. It's all
about threats to democracy and you know, democrats on the
Supreme Court as you know, the last hope of freedom,
and it just makes me roll my eyes. I hate
that kind of rhetoric. You know, it's really seeped into
kind of all corners of our nation's political life, you know,
really apocalyptic language, and I think it does a disservice
to everyone, and I think voters are getting tired of it.
But because of this huge, long debacle we just had
with Jefferson Griffin, I think that voters are going to
be a little bit more receptive to it. And I
think Justice Earls is just going to raise an unbelievable
amount of money. I went in and looked at some
of the dollar figures, and the cost of a Supreme
Court seat has really gone up a ton over the
past ten years. You know, the Sherry Beasley Paul Newby race,
which really wasn't that ago. That was twenty twenty, you know,
that was a three million dollar race. Alison Riggs raised
five million herself just this past year, and Jefferson Griffin
had two million on top of that. I think Earls
is going to just blow that out of the water.
It's going to be a ten million dollar Supreme Court race,
so the airwaves will be packed with this doom and gloom,
death of democracy stuff.
Speaker 1: Do you think the cost of the races is tied
to the increase in lawfare essentially?
Speaker 2: I think that's a big part of it. I think also,
you know, national interest groups have really set their sights
on the Supreme Court seats in North Carolina. If you
look at Alison Riggs donations in this past cycle, pages
and pages, thousands and thousands of them were you know,
they show up as aggregated individual contributions and basically what
that means is, you know it's Act Blue. Yes, when
people are clicking on a Facebook ad and donating ten
twenty dollars and that's going to be ramped up really
high in this race, and it's a great way to
get millions of dollars that you don't know where it's
coming from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we've covered the Act Blue scandal in my
I mean, to me, it's obviously a scandal, but it
does not get nearly the attention it should. But at
least they I think they did put in. They put
in a safeguard that they had been ignoring for years prior,
so I don't know, maybe it's a little bit better. Also,
your talk about the you know, this language of the
apocalypse in all of these campaign stump speeches. My concern
with that as well is that it creates a permission
structure for basically anything, because if if the alternative is
utter apocalypse, then you're justified almost in doing really anything
to prevent that. It's like the it's like the comparisons
to Hitler and Nazis. It's it's like, well, if you're
trying to prevent Hitler from taking over, you can really
do just about anything. And that's the concern I have
with that kind of language as well. Now, absolutely, yeah,
on the House or on the budget side of things,
we've been kind of in this lull between Memorial Day
and now they're coming back and you've got the House
with its budget proposal, you've got the Senate with its
budget proposal. Both of them are Republican controlled, but their
budget proposals are are pretty different. They spend the same
amount of money, but they do it differently. So what
is you talk about in your piece over at long
leave politics. The difference in philosophy between the House approach
and the Senate approach. So what's the difference in the philosophy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's always been a difference in a
House and a Senate budget. You know, the Senate tends
to be a little bit more conservative, you know, with
lower spending levels, lower taxes. The House has always been
a little bit more spending.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: The House is more willing to, you know, allocate a
little bit more or to so that sort of thing.
I think a lot of it has to do with
how many more members there are in the House, and
everybody wants their own little little project to be a
part of the budget. But this year it's it's unusually
divergent between the House and the Senate. You know, as
you mentioned, the top line spending figure is the same.
The big difference is on taxes. You know, the Senate
proposes actually accelerating the tax cuts. There's been tax cuts planned.
You know, it's going to keep the personal income text
is set to steadily drop over the next couple of years.
The House proposal actually pauses that and requires the state
to have higher levels of revenue before taxes drop again.
Where the Senate just goes full on, we're actually going
to lock in some of these tax cuts. And because
of that, you know, the House has more spending. You know,
it has the fifty thousand dollars starting salary for teachers,
where the Senate doesn't. Those are kind of the big differences.
But you know, one of the other really unusual things
that I'm picking up on this year is the reaction
to the two budgets. You know, the Senate put out
their budget first a couple months ago and there wasn't
much reaction at all. But when the House dropped this budget,
I mean, it got all sorts of support from from
all corners, including from Democrats, which is just a completely
different dynamic from what we've seen. You know, there was
you never heard of Governor Cooper praise a Republican budget,
so that was super unusual to see.
Speaker 1: Right And in fact, the Club for Growth, and I've
got a copy of it, they went after they said, hey,
we're gonna you know, we're gonna score this these budgets,
and we're not going to be cool if you guys
do this House budget and you say in your piece
that they threatened to blackball anybody who voted for it,
but then they quickly backed down, so I did not
see the backing down. What happened? There any explanation given
for that?
Speaker 2: No, I mean everything just kind of quietly went away. Yeah,
I think the post got deleted and haven't heard a
word about it since. I don't know who was picking
up the phone and saying don't do this. But I
don't think that that will be a factor in the
compromise and.
Speaker 1: Negotiation, yeah, which are underway or about to be underway soon,
and we'll be following it. Andrew Dunn, I appreciate your
time as always, sir, great work as always, and we'll
talk to you next week. All right, thank you, thank you.
That's Andrew Dunn. He is a contributing columnist at the
Charlotte Observer, and he is the publisher of long Leaf Politics.
That website is longleafpol dot com. All right, if you're
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but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. So the GOP controlled house in
North Carolina, the General Assembly. The House passed its budget
plan by a vote of ninety three to twenty and
that earned some and that included by the way, the
three included twenty seven Democrats, which is more than half
of the Democrat caucus. Right only twenty votes against the plan,
even earning support from the House Minority Leader Robert Reeves.
The Democrat leader, described the GOP authored proposal as a
quote negotiating document that's better than a plan proposed by
the Senate. He said, quote, I voted for the House
budget understanding that there are a lot of policies I
disagree with and hope to see removed during the conference period.
You think that's going to happen? Okay, he says. The
House is serious about governing this state, and it is
up to the Senate to come to the table in
good faith. Now, I would be curious. I would be
curious to see if the Senate were to just say, okay,
House will do your plan, and then see how many
Democrats actually vote for the final version if it were
exactly the same. Would they still vote for the budget
if it were exactly the same as the one that
they just voted for. Broadly speaking, this is according to
Will Duran, Emily Walkinhorst, and Paul Speckt at WRL. Broadly speaking,
the House favors larger state employee raises than the Senate,
more state job cuts, and smaller income tax cuts. Right,
So those are sort of like the key takeaways here
you've got smaller income tax cuts, more state jobs eliminated,
but larger employee raises. Its budget plan proposes new types
of tax reforms, like the return of the Baptist schools
sales tax holiday gimmick. That's what that is. That's a gimmick.
But on this one weekend, everybody gets to shop for
stuff and there's no sales tax. Also no tax on tips.
The Senate plan doesn't have that. State Representative Terry Brown,
Democrat from Mecklenburg, said he appreciated Republican efforts to include
some initiatives that Democrats have sought for years, particularly the
back to school sales tax holiday. See, because Democrats love
imposing taxes and then giving carve outs. It's like the
tax incentives, and Republicans do this too, in order to
attract new businesses. Right at least, Republicans also say we
should keep taxes low for all businesses so the existing
ones can benefit as well from tax policy, rather than
having high corporate tax and then giving car vouts and
forgiveness and you know, incentives for businesses to relocate here.
But Democrats, so that it's obvious why they like the
sales tax holiday, they want a sales tax, and then
they want to be able to, you know, give people
a jubilee for certain periods of the year. This is
Terry Brown again, Democrat, Mecklenberg County state representative. He praised
the House Republicans for taking measures to potentially avoid a
revenue shortfall. So this has been projected out in I
forget how long, I think it's about four years or
something away that there is this projection from the legislative
staff that there's going to be a budget shortfall, that
the revenue is not going to keep up with expenses
in like four or six years, whatever it is. And
so Democrats have dare I say pounced seized Maybe they
have seized on this projection in order to argue against
any kind of tax cut, even though the Republican philosophy
is you cut the taxes and that generates more economic activity,
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memories that'll last a lifetime. The North Carolina Legislature coming
back now after a brief hiatus, they will be hashing
out the budget, and so be prepared. You know, we've
got local budgets being done up as well. I got
Mecklenburg County on the radar here said, I've Charlotte did
their budget straw vote last night. The chambers the House
and Senate up in Raleigh. They do agree on some issues,
according to WRAL, such as a plan to free up
more than one hundred million dollars to help pay for
tax cuts by slashing spending on higher education and requiring
universities to raise tuition. They both also seek to eliminate
state programs aimed at helping black, Hispanic and other minority communities,
with Republican politicians saying they want to root out pro
diversity efforts within state government. Pro diversity efforts. That's the
way WRAL frames the uprooting of the racisty DEI regime.
Let's see, is there anything else that is a very
lengthy piece? Okay? So then I go to the Carolina Journal.
This a piece by Brianna Kramer Carolina Journal dot com.
Like the Senate proposal from April, the House budget from
May will cost the same amount of money sixty six
billion dollars over the next two fiscal years because they
do their budgets in two year cycles. And just real
quick that we're in the long session right now, which
is when they construct the two year biennium the budget,
and then next year they do a short session where
they make minor adjustments to the budget theoretically, and they're
supposed to just do like some cleanup work. It's not
supposed to be a long session, although in years past
the short session has gone on quite long. Which I
would be in favor of an actual calendar, to put
everybody on a calendar. And I'm not just saying that
because my last name is Calendar, which sounds a lot
like calendar but is spelled totally differently. But I think
it would be helpful to put some deadlines in place,
much like we have the crossover deadline, when the House
and the Senate have to have all their bills filed
and then cross over to the other chamber. It forces
the lawmakers to get stuff done. So sometimes these sessions
go on and on and on because there isn't a
specified end date. Anyway, the House aims to bolster pay
from any taxpayer funded jobs to do so. The House
plan reallocate savings from government efficiency efforts like defunding DEI programs.
See that's another way that you could report what WRAL
just told you. That'll bring in over ten million dollars
in a forthcoming amendment. They also plan to instruct agencies
to cut a percentage of vacant government positions just don't
fill them. So nobody's getting fired, they're just eliminating positions.
The House proposal would give a two and a half
percent across the board pay raise for state agency employees,
community college staff, and UNC system personnel. It also provides
state retirees with a one percent cost of living bonus
in year one and a two percent bonus in year two.
Teachers they would see an eight point seven percent increase
in their salary over the course of the two year
budget cycle, and so by the end of that two
year cycle they would be at fifty six thousand, five
five hundred and ninety three dollars a year. So fifty
six and a half thousand dollars for the average or
sorry for the starting teacher salary, no experience starting teacher
pay fifty six and a half thousand dollars. The House
plan would also make North Carolina the number one state
in the Southeast for entry level teacher pay, which will then,
of course prompt outrage from the veteran teachers. What about
teachers that have been here so long. See, when they
do one chunk at a time, the chunk that is
not addressed in the current chunk, they get outraged because
this happened, and the left and the media. But I
repeat myself, they they always they used the group that
didn't get the big bump this year to you know,
pummel the Republicans over. But then the next time around,
the Republicans go back and do them like in this case,
it would be the veteran teachers, and then they would
get an increase. This way, it's not all one big,
massive budget hit all at one time. The plan would
also restore master's pay to reward teachers who have pursued
graduate school. The additional pay for teachers was previously funded
up until twenty thirteen. Republicans got rid of this additional
pay for masters. And I think that's for the masters
because I think they did reinstate the National Board certified
pay increase because at the time this was twelve years ago.
They were pointing to studies that showed the teachers who
get master's degrees don't actually have there's no correlation to
improved student outcomes. So why would you pay to have
teachers get master's degrees just to give them more money
when it doesn't actually improve the performance of the students.
The House wants to slow down the pace of income
tax cuts scheduled for the next few years. This is
going to be a big riff between the two plans.
Back when the Republicans took over control of the General
Assembly in twenty ten, they won the election in twenty
ten under maps, the Democrats drew themselves. I always point
that out. They won. They then took office in twenty eleven,
and one of the first things they did people dubbed
it Rucho nomics, named after Bob Ruco, state senator from
Mecklenburg County, And he said, we're going to we're going
to drive down the income tax rates, personal income tax
and corporate income tax. We're going to drive down these rates.
And Bob always wanted to get to zero. And so
they said, okay, we're going to have triggers, right, So
if we have a certain revenue growth, we have certain
economic activity right that we're not running deficits, then that
will trigger the next cut of like a quarter point
or half a point. And so the triggers that are
fixing to take hold or sorry, fixing the tackle, the
Senate wants to keep those, and the House wants to
pump the brakes on them. The personal income tax rate
is scheduled to go from four and a quarter percent
down to three point ninety nine, so a quarter point
dropper twenty six point twenty six, and then the possibility
of further reductions would be down to two forty nine
two point four nine percent, so a point and a
half by the year twenty twenty nine. But again this
is only if the triggers are hit. The budget would
exempt the first five thousand dollars in tipped wages from
personal income tax. Leaders also want to reinstate the back
to school sales tax holiday weekend. That's why Democrats are
in love with it. Also, in line with disaster recovery,
the House wants to replenish the sale savings reserve that
has been depleted through recovery aid to help western North
Carolina since Hurricane Helene. The state savings reserve balance has
decreased from four point seventy five billion down to three
point six billion. Both the House and the Senate recommend
replenishing the account to its pre Hellene number. Other provisions
DMV privatization pilot program, Oh please please, disaster recovery redirects
NC innovation funding, which I was never really sold on.
That program funding would be diverted then to ongoing relief
and recovery efforts. They also want to throw fifty million
in grants to improve safety and security in schools across
North Carolina. By the way, the DMV privatization pilot, it
would fund dozens of new positions at the DMV while
authorizing a pilot program to test private license renewal services.
And finally, from the Carolina Journal, the two chambers, you
will now begin negotiating a final budget. And once the
House passes its budget, which it did, the Senate then
will have to vote not to concur or to concur.
They're not going to concur, and so they're going to
go into negotiations what's called the Conference committee, and we'll
see what happens from there. All right, So spring is
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all the details that create a video dot com. Let's
head over to the phones and speak with Bain. Hello, Bane,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you, pe sir.
Speaker 3: Question for you all right, How are vacancy's factored into
the budgeting process. You always hear that a municipality will
be short two hundred and fifty police officers or short
one thousand teachers. Is then't there a surplus?
Speaker 1: Well if they right, if they go unfilled right for
the whole year, then the municipality, like from a municipality,
it may very well reallocate the funding someplace else, Okay,
so that for just that year, like towards the end
of the year, they may end up with, you know,
surplus revenue that was not used to pay for the
vacant positions, and so then they could turn around and
spend it on like a one time spend or put
it into savings or something. But for the teachers, it's
a little bit different because the teacher allocation numbers are
based on attendance on I think they do the twentieth
day count, so on day twenty of all new school years,
that's where that's how they allocate your funding levels, is
how many kids are in school on the twentieth day
of school?
Speaker 3: Got it? Okay? Thank you?
Speaker 1: All right? Yes, sir, I mean I think that's true.
I could be completely wrong, but I mean that's what
I would do. So there's an organization called the Carolina
Partnership for Reform North Carolina CPRNC dot org is their website,
And this is a conservative organization, and they're calling this
House budget a Republican sponsored tax hike, and they said
having no budget deal is a better outcome than this one.
Raising taxes was such a bright red political line for
North Carolina Republicans that when faced with a three point
seven billion dollar state budget deficit during the Reform majority's
very first budget cycle, as I mentioned back in twenty eleven,
Conservatives allowed a scheduled one sense sales tax reduction and
scheduled reduction of the personal and corporate income taxes to
go into effect. Democrats had put in place these quote
unquote temporary taxes, and then they kept extending them. Because
the Democrats had built budgets that were structurally deficit laiden,
they could not figure out how to stop spending, because
the Democrat philosophy is, see penny, spend a penny, and oh,
we get this revenue in this year, let's use it
for ongoing operations, Like well, well, no, we don't know
if the revenue next year is going to be as
it is this year. What if there's a recession, Right,
you want to grow your way out of these deficits.
That's the Republican philosophy. Well at the state level, and
well until now so Republican House Speaker at the time
Tom Tillis and Senate President pro Tem Philberger correctly called
Democrat Governor Bev Purdues planned to delay those tax cuts
a tax increase. Right, These things were scheduled to sunset,
and she was like, don't let them sunset. And they said, well,
that's a tax increase. Well, the same mentality then should
apply now, right. The reform majority in the legislature adopted
a two pronged philosophy on taxes, Rutronomics, named after Bob Rujo,
Senate Finance Committee chairman. The first part was that taxes
like the income tax or the franchise tax, these things
penalized earning, wealth, generation, and holding assets. And they said
that's unfair and a disincentivized investment, disincentivized productivity as well
as work. Unlike income taxes, sales and excise taxes that
tax consumption and spending were fairer because they do not
disincentivise investment. Productivity and work. So that's the first part
of the philosophy. The second part was that tax policies
should not pick winners and losers. A single low tax
rate across the board to a broad tax base was
the fairest and most pro growth state tax policy. And
to this end, legislators eliminated hundreds of millions, if not
billions of dollars worth of tax loopholes and carve outs
in order to flatten and reduce North Carolina's tax rates.
And that philosophy paid enormous dividends for our state economy.
It increased our state GDP. Family incomes have been rising
over the last decade. We end up as the top
or one of the top states in the nation for
business by Forbes, US news sites, Selection magazines right all
as a result of the conservative approach, North Carolina went
from having the highest income taxes in the region to
the lowest income taxes in the region. And so now
you've got states that are copying us, And now you've
got the House budget that is looking to slow down
this reform effort. And so what they're saying is a
vote for a budget proposal that increases personal income taxes
on North Carolinians by over two billion dollars. The whole
policy principle of the Reform majority, as they called themselves,
that's now in peril. The House increases the personal income
tax triggers by over three billion dollars this year and
by a staggering seven billion in later years to ensure
that North Carolina taxpayers will pay far more in personal
income taxes than they would if the scheduled cuts in
current law take effect. It's a tax increase according to
these conservatives. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
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