Gov. McCrory is expected to release his budget proposal today, and in so doing will mark the beginning of a new, more honest and transparent budgeting process. As reported by the N&O:
A new state law has ended the decades-old practice of automatically building in numbers that account for expected growth, such as covering the cost of more children attending public schools each year. Also no longer part of the beginning, or baseline, of the budget is the cost of covering additional people expected to enroll in Medicaid, the government health insurance program.
Those items are now debatable, instead of being included automatically based on regular forecasting.
For decades now, progressives have decried budget “cuts” in cases where the budget actually spends more than the previous year. The reason they made the claim is that the state budget didn’t grow as much as the automatic increases dictated it should. With the new baseline budgeting process, these misleading cries of budget cuts that aren’t really cuts will be exposed for the fabrication they are.
The old way of putting the budget on a sort of “cruise-control” in which it automatically increased every year helped lead North Carolina’s per capita spending to grow by 62 percent over the last 30 years – even after adjusting for inflation. Perhaps this new method of budgeting will push legislators to more closely evaluate and prioritize how they spend our tax dollars – maybe even they’ll begin to question taxpayer support for some of the items features in our Waste of the Week series.
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