#ncpol: DUMB -DA-DUMB-DUMB

 

There’s nothing like having  someone young enough to be your daughter, with 1/100th the life experience and 1/1000th the business experience, tell you that what you’re saying is dumb.  Especially when this particular teenager is a “policy analyst” for Civitas,  allegedly the leader in conservative thought in North Carolina.

 

 

My original point was THIS:  It’s not a good thing for conservatives to be cheering (1) the idea of government having more money than it needs or (2) the fact that it confiscated more money from hard-working North Carolinians than it needed to.   We’re talking about nearly ONE BILLION dollars of extra cash here.

 

This young lady dismisses my concerns and says we can just dump it all into “the rainy day fund.”  THAT means it will be spent.  Giving an already bloated state government nearly ONE BILLION dollars more to spend is not a thing conservatives should be cheering.

 

 

Government is not a for-profit enterprise.  If we were talking about a business, a revenue surplus of nearly ONE BILLION would be something to celebrate.

 

Tax reform played a big role in creating this “surplus.”  A bunch of taxes on services got  added.  Some income taxes got slightly tweaked.  But the other part of the equation — spending — barely got addressed.  It held or got tweaked upward slightly.   We still have a lot more tax-cutting — tax reforming — to do in order to really accomplish something remarkable.

 

This is what went wrong in the Reagan years — taxes got cut, but spending didn’t.  So we got deficits.

 

We can’t have deficits in state government.

 

But we can get spending increases or growth in the bureaucracy.  And THAT is what we’re going to get with this “surplus.”

 

I can understand politicians being happy about this “over-collection.”  It’s more cash for them to use to buy votes and secure their seats in the legislature.

 

Civitas — our state’s alleged leader in conservative thought — ought to know better.