- As focus turns to the state budget this spring, liberals will predictably claim that the state budget has been “slashed” or “cut to the bone”
- Reality, however, shows that the state budget has grown at a rate three times as fast as population – even after adjusting for inflation – over the last three and a half decades
North Carolina’s 2018 “short” legislative session will get into full swing later this spring – after the brief special sessions begun last week conclude.
The main point of business will be adjusting the second year of the two-year state budget plan approved in 2017. Last year, Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the budget proposal, calling it “short sighted and small minded.” Cooper’s main objections were that the budget didn’t spend enough and it included tax cuts.
We should expect similar disagreements this year as well. Big-government liberals will trot out their well-worn, predictable slogans like “government has been cut to the bone” and the state budget has been “slashed.”
When placed into context, however, such claims simply don’t square with the reality of North Carolina’s long-term budgetary trends.
The chart[i] below shows the trend lines for the state’s inflation-adjusted General Fund budget, compared to population growth, for the past 35 years.
As you can see, even after adjusting for inflation, North Carolina’s state budget is now three times as large as it was in the early 1980s. But isn’t that just a reflection of a rapidly growing state? No. Compare that growth rate to the state’s population growth rate during that time of 73 percent.
In short, inflation-adjusted spending has exploded at a rate nearly three times as fast as population since 1982.
As a result, North Carolina’s spending per person — even after adjusting for inflation — has ballooned by more than 70 percent. Put differently, North Carolina’s state budget now spends $821 more for every man, woman and child than it did in in 1982 – not due to inflation but in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That comes to an increase of more than $3,200 for every family of four.
Sure, state spending leveled off a bit after the great recession, but there is no denying the massive increment of state government spending over the last three and a half decades.
[i] Sources for chart include: North Carolina Legislative Fiscal Research Division, annual Post-Legislative summaries; North Carolina Office of State Budget & Management for population data; and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Reserve Economic data for price deflator (spending adjusted to 2009 dollars): https://fred.stlouisfed.org
Read about the Trillions of Dollars that Brian Balfour never seems capable of acknowledging. Then, get on your Narcissist / Nationalist soapbox and complain about all your Tax dollars being wasted.
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
This reminds me of what happened to the national debt.Obama and the Gimmedats managed to spend more than all the Presidents before him combined and still let the military go to below WW2 readiness.A lot of drug dealers got free phones and the military are robbing parts off planes to fix other ones.Anybody that can look at what the Feds and North Carolina are both spending and not see waste is a total moron.The congress actually paid for a study of the sex lives of polish frogs.There has never been a spending bill in history that the Democrats didn’t think was too small.Anybody not complaining about paying too much in taxes is not paying much if any.As I have posted before there are over 30,000 federal employees making more than 190,000 dollars a year.Think how much that will be in pensions for their life.
Scott,
Just an FYI, the North Carolina General Fund budget does not finance the U.S. military. You are obviously confused, hope that cleared things up for you.
Thanks!
Mr. Balfour:
Mr. Scott prefaced his remarks with the qualification that he was talking about the federal budget. His point was nonetheless very true — that government employees never believe they are being paid enough (even when their salaries and benefits exceed those in the private sector) or that they are getting enough money for their programs, whether said employees are state or federal. Having worked for government in two states, I can guarantee that the thinking is the same, and when directives come from the elected officials to trim down or at least to hold the growth in the spending, the wasteful garbage is the last thing to go. What is normally done by the bureaucrats is that they “Close the Washington Monument,” that is, they cut out something which is sure to gain media attention and make the public believe all the nonsense about things being “cut to the bone.”
The taxpayers have spent three times as much on poverty programs as we have on all our wars going back to the Revolutionary war.This,of course is the federal budget and not North Carolina’s.Amazing though that is about the same amount as the national debt.
Polish frogs ?
Yep.That was an honest to goodness one of the boondoggles that those idiots in Washington spent money on.