A Budget Veto to Get Behind

I support the Democratic governor’s veto of the state budget.

No, not Perdue’s. That was a shameless bit of overdramatic politicking. I’m talking about Governor Jerry Brown in California.

Governor Brown vetoed the California state budget just hours after it was passed, calling it “unbalanced”. One could almost imagine Perdue using those words for the budget she vetoed. But how refreshingly different is Brown’s veto!

Perdue issued her veto because Democratic interest groups were facing marginal cuts in funding. Of course, any cuts at all to public education constitute irreparable “generational damage” and the “worst budget in modern North Carolina history for education“, despite the fact that per-student education spending was much lower for most of the 1990s. Apparently modernity only includes the last decade. To pay for it, she was agitating to keep a “temporary” sales tax hike.

Brown’s veto, on the other hand, came because he wasn’t willing to raise sales taxes. California’s budget also included shady accounting measures to gloss over the state’s deficit – which are, of course, a handy political cop-out, one which North Carolina legislators have used many times in the past. In short, it was an unrealistic budget which would “add to [California’s] wall of debt”, and increase the burden of government on the private sector – much like Perdue’s own proposed budget.

This is not the kind of budget to support – ever; much less in the middle of crisis. Let’s hope we don’t have to go as far down the debt hole as California before our own governor realizes it too.