"Illegal ’immigrants’ living in this state and have an electric bill with someone’s name on it, are a winners because they can register to vote, then vote on the same day at a ‘one-stop voting’ precinct. The biggest losers here are the hard working folks at Election Board offices who already have their plates full just handling the election process itself, but will now have to also deal with this catastrophe in waiting."

August 22, 2007

Winners And Losers In North Carolina 07/08 Budget And Legislative Moves

Lee P. Butler

This editorial is centered around North carolna politics, but is surely representative of many places where you live.

Once again the Democrat led North Carolina state government went beyond the fiscal year deadline as they usually do wasting time and more tax payer dollars to do little more than raise our taxes and tell us afterwards what a fantastic job they did at our expense.

What’s worse is our locally elected Democrat leadership is doing the same thing to us. This seems like as good a time as any to review the winners and losers of the recent mandates forced on the hard working, tax-paying families of Richmond County and the state by our elected Democrat leaders.

The first winners just happen to be the richest among us. Even though liberal media elitists regularly berate the president as giving ‘tax cuts to the rich’ when he gave every taxpayer a tax cut regardless of income level, N.C. Senate and House Democrats cut the top income rate to 7.75%; a ¼% tax decrease for only the top income earners, yet those same media people are blind to this.

Which makes the big losers in this debacle - every other tax payer in the state! Not only didn’t we get a tax cut, but the Democrat leadership made the ‘temporary’ sales tax increase they created a few years ago to ‘help us get through the rough times’ permanent, making those Democrat leaders liars and eradicates the notion that they are for the ‘poor.’

More winners are people who blow their paychecks buying scratch tickets in the N.C. Education Lottery providing more money to pay for government funded daycare programs that do not prove to have any lasting benefit of helping educate our children and gambling addicts who will get bigger payouts, effectively taking more money away from the very people the lottery money was supposed to be used for… our children.

If you believe in protecting the lives of convicted serial killers who kidnap, torture, rape and kill innocent victims in cold blood by shielding them from the death penalty or see no need to strengthen laws directed at prosecuting child sexual predators, then you are a winner. The families of victims in either case have been totally disrespected and neglected by Democrats in this state.

Illegal ’immigrants’ living in this state and have an electric bill with someone’s name on it, are a winners because they can register to vote, then vote on the same day at a ‘one-stop voting’ precinct. The biggest losers here are the hard working folks at Election Board offices who already have their plates full just handling the election process itself, but will now have to also deal with this catastrophe in waiting.

What about the great vaunted ‘Medicaid swap’? Locally, after county commissioners ran re-election campaigns reminding voters that they hadn’t raised our property taxes in years even though they were responsible for ‘re-evaluating’ the appraisal values of our property causing our tax bills to increase several times over during that span of time.

Then they ‘let’ us vote for our own tax increase with the school bond issue. Once they were re-elected, using the exorbinent cost of Medicaid burdening county budgets, they passed a 10 cent property tax increase which totals a 15 cent increase in two years.

Now, along with the state Democrat leadership, our local Democrat leaders will once again ask us to raise taxes on ourselves either through a land transfer tax or a sales tax increase of a ¼ cent along with doing yet another property appraisal. Here’s the rub, say you vote to raise the sales tax, when the state takes the full Medicaid burden from the counties, they will also take ½ cent sales tax revenue from the counties.

So your ¼ cent increase plus another ¼ cent will be confiscated from the county, meaning you will not; without some strong leadership here, get a reduction in the economically destructive tax increases that have been placed on the tax payers in the county.

If the state Democrats can do that today, why couldn’t they have absorbed the Medicaid costs of the counties years ago when they first raised the ’temporary’, but now permanent, 2 cent sales tax increase which would apparently have eliminated the tax increase placed on tax payers in the county using those Medicaid costs as an excuse?

As a matter of fact, the Democrat leadership in North Carolina have so taxed the incomes of hard working families across the state that we had a surplus of revenue collections in the amount of 1.5 BILLION dollars, yet after a 9.5 percent increase in budget expenditures that makes an almost 20 percent increase over the last two years, yet they once again had to raid the Highway Trust Fund of 172 million dollars to help balance the general fund.

Just think about that school bus sitting on the collapsed bridge in Minnesota while you calculate how much money we could have put into our road system infrastructure over the last decade while the Democrat leadership was stealing millions of our highway money every year to accommodate their tax-and-spend financial philosophy!

From 1975 up to today, the state budget has gone from 1.7 billion dollars to 20.7 billions dollars, an increase in the cost of government that far outpaces population growth plus inflation in the state during the same time period.

That’s why Republicans in the House and Senate have offered legislation titled the Taxpayers Protection Act (HB 1543/ SB 14) that would regulate spending based on those factors, create a budget stabilization fund in an amount up to last year’s spending limit, refund any extra revenue to tax payers in the form of refunds or reductions in tax rates, and move fiscal year spending limits to a 3/5 vote in the General Assembly.

With the current Democrat leadership, these bills have not and never will see the light of day. Two Democrats did vote against the state budget because of the excessive expense, one of them being 72 year old lawyer Jimmy Love. "That's one reason I voted against the bill," said the House Democrat from Sanford. "I thought it was too much. It just keeps growing and growing. I think the public is catching on to that."

Maybe so, but we won’t know for sure until the 2008 election. The problem now is working North Carolina families will have to wash dishes to pay the dinner bill because there won’t be any money left in our pay checks by then.

Lee P Butler is the Vice Chairman of the Richmond County Republican Party where he resides with his wife and three children and has been published in several outlets including The Richmond County Daily Journal, OpinionEditorials.com, The North Carolina Conservative, The Lasting Joy, and is the owner/publisher of leepbutler.com.

lee@leepbutler.com

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