With one $25 million-dollar pier currently under construction in Nags Head, Dare County and Aquarium officials have shifted focus to the next of the three proposed piers. Partnered with the Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, the next “$25 million-dollar pier” will be located in Emerald Isle on land donated by the town.
At a meeting of Pier Advisory Committee last week, Aquarium Society Director of Development Jay Barnes presented that he had spoken with both Sen. Preston (R – Carteret) and Rep. McElraft (R – Carteret) and “both are very supportive” of the project.
No, don’t adjust your browser settings. You read that right.
Despite the “lashing” the first pier received following funding by General Assembly at a time when other priorities were being cut, two supposed conservative Republicans, Sen. Preston and Rep. McElraft, are in support of yet another taxpayer funded pier. There is currently one privately owned fishing pier in Emerald Isle.
The Aquarium Society has (finally) commissioned an economic impact study to be conducted by the economics department at UNC – Wilmington on the three proposed piers. Supporters hope this study will “give some credibility to the arguments we make about how important the piers are.”
I suppose we shall see if we can expect another “Aquarium Satellite Areas Funding” bill to come sailing through the General Assembly again soon. I wonder if Basnight Construction will get some work on this one too?
Graciously, Dell has decided to keep its doors open until July of this year. You remember Dell, the company that the state gave in excess of $250 million worth of tax incentives and promises to in late 2004 to lure into the state. With only five years gone by since Dell opened its doors here in North Carolina, I doubt that many of the politicians who pushed for such an ambitious package are proud of the results.
Our elected officials in Raleigh apparently realize that tax breaks will lure more business into the state. What amazes me is that they do not understand that lowering the corporate tax rate will render these incentive deals unnecessary because the general business climate in the state will be more attractive.
I imagine there were a few people shaking their heads this morning when they read about the punishment – or lack thereof – that was handed out to State Sen. R.C. Soles (See: news article). Yesterday Sen. Soles pled guilty in a Columbus County Courthouse to a misdemeanor assault with a weapon charge and paid a $1,000 fine. The incident in question took place last August when Soles fired on an intruder, Kyle Blackburn who had broken into his Tabor City home. Blackburn also happened to be a former client of Soles and — at the time of the incident — had been recently released from jail. Yeah, I know it sounds like a bad script from one of those TV movie channels. Unfortunately, it’s true.
So much for the work of those folks who served on the grand jury in January and indicted Sen. Soles on a felony assault charge. Soles’ plea means he will face no other penalties. Had Soles been convicted of a felony, he faced losing his senate seat, prison time and his law license. Sen.Soles is the longest serving member of the North Carolina legislature, having first been elected to the General Assembly in 1968. He is also Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus. I wonder if a few of the ties Sen. Soles developed over the past four decades came in handy in resolving his troubles. Anybody who thinks an average citizen would have been treated the same way, let me know.
Just yesterday, I blogged about one of Gov. Perdue’s senior advisers warning that two to three thousand state employee jobs may be cut this year due to another massive budget deficit. I concluded with this comment:
That last line no doubt triggered an emergency alarm at SEANC headquarters.
Those SEANC folks must have given the Governor’s office an earful yesterday. As mentioned in Under the Dome, the Governor’s office has already backtracked and is attempting to spin out of those comments:
A Wilmington Star-News story quoted a senior aide to Gov. Bev Perdue official warning yesterday of 2,000 to 3,000 layoffs of state employees in the next fiscal year. (emphasis mine)
Not so, said Perdue Communications Director Chrissy Pearson. She said Perdue and her chief lobbyist, Andy Willis, both spoke to the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition meeting in Wilmington and talked about how the state has shed that many jobs over the past year.
“There are no plans to cut state employees,” Pearson said, though she cautioned that the administration is always looking for program efficiencies that could eliminate some jobs.
But let’s re-examine Willis’ comment: “Two thousand to 3,000 employees will probably lose their jobs,” he told the mayors.”
What part of “will probably lose” implies the past tense?
Sounds more like the Governor’s office is desperately trying to appease a powerful lobby. The reality is, with employee payroll & benefits being far and away the largest segment of the state budget (roughly 60-65%); any significant cutbacks will have to include decreasing state employees.
No, that’s not the title of some new whacked-out reality show on an obscure cable network. Rather, it is the title of the Civitas Institute’s list of The 10 Worst Federal Stimulus Projects in North Carolina.
Check it out and see what your tax dollars and your children’s debt are funding.
According to NCRecovery.gov, North Carolina will receive approximately $8.9 billion from President Obama’s stimulus plan passed in February 2009. It ought to be easy for Governor Perdue to create jobs in North Carolina will all of that money. But the unemployment rate for North Carolina was 11.2% last month according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 7th highest in the nation.
North Carolina had a population of 9.2 million according to US Census Bureau estimates in 2008. If Governor Perdue were to give each North Carolinian an equal amount of the projected funding from the stimulus package, each of us would receive $967; an impressive amount of money. Who among us would not be stimulated by an extra $967 in their bank account?
Consider also that the entire state budget for the 1993-1994 fiscal year in North Carolina was $8.9 billion and you can see how massive the amount of money coming into the Tar Heel state is. Where has this money gone? One example, our state received $132 million for home weatherization. See what else North Carolina’s job creation money is being spent on here.
In front of a gathering of NC mayors in Wilmington yesterday, Gov. Perdue warned those in attendance about the budget difficulties facing the state this year:
It will be another bleak budget for the state this year, Gov. Bev Perdue warned a group of mayors meeting in Wilmington on Wednesday.
Laying off more state employees, eliminating half a billion dollars of programs and hiring outside contractors to perform some existing government duties are all possibilities as the state struggles to recover from the economic meltdown.
“It’s my goal with the (legislative) session to focus on restructuring government,” Perdue said to the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, a group of mayors representing 26 of the state’s larger cities.
She said that includes everything from eliminating some of the state’s 600 boards and commissions (600!?! – BB) to getting outside experts to provide some of the functions that make the government run, such as technology services.
Layoffs of state workers also looks likely, said Andy Willis, Perdue’s senior adviser for governmental affairs.
“Two thousand to 3,000 employees will probably lose their jobs,” he told the mayors.
That last line no doubt triggered an emergency alarm at SEANC headquarters. This summer’s budget negotiations is shaping up to be another wild ride.
The Health Care Summit kicks off tomorrow and President Obama already unveiled his new health care proposal earlier this week. The Summit is meant to be bipartisan meeting between Republicans and Democrats and an opportunity to find common ground and share reform ideas.
That sounds lovely. However it will certainly be difficult to find any common ground in the President’s latest plan.
Among the proposals included in the plan is a measure to create a Health Insurance Rate Authority, a body in charge of capping premium rates insurance companies can charge.
Why is it that every government solution begins with the creation of a new bureaucratic entity?
A true solution to the growing problem of rising health insurance premiums would begin with the recognition of the underlying problem. One of the reasons private health insurance premiums continue to rise is that Medicare and Medicaid do not pay full reimbursement rates to hospitals and health care providers. The result is hospitals and providers charge private insurers higher rates in order to meet their operating costs. Those higher rates are passed on to policy holders through higher premiums.
The proposed solution to cap premium rates does not address this problem. It does not address the rising cost of health care or the increased use of medical services. It also does not address the unfunded liabilities of government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Since the government won’t change the rate at which providers are reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid – because that would mean a direct and unpopular tax increase, then the only alternative outcome is insolvency and ultimately bankruptcy for private health insurance companies.
Additionally many states have already created measures to regulate private health insurance companies. Health insurers often have to request permission from the state before they increase premiums. Hence this measure would remove authority from the state and transfer it directly to the federal government, rendering an already ineffective process substantially more inefficient.
On March 1st Medicare payments to doctors are scheduled to be cut by at least 21 percent. The reasoning is that cutting provider costs will contain Medicare spending and provide a clear and veritable means to fund expensive health care reforms being proposed by President Obama and the Democratic majority. Even though these types of unpopular payment cuts have been stopped in the legislature many times before, Democrats refuse to eliminate the proposition entirely because of the fact that it is an easy alternative in a quickly shrinking pool of cost containing measures.
How will cutting payments to physicians help heal our health care system?
The answer is it won’t – and will certainly make matters much worse.
One of the biggest challenges facing the health care system is the shortage of practicing primary care physicians. With fewer doctors, patients have less access to care. A recent article cites a study conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association which notes that there has been a substantial decline in doctors’ total number of work hours per week in the last decade, coinciding with declining pay rates. In fact, perhaps not surprisingly, the study shows that doctors who worked in cities with higher payment rates worked longer hours than those with lower rates.
Longer wait times and decreasing quality of care will be the only result of fewer physicians taking on more and more patients. One of the main targets of health reform is to improve access to care in the system. So it seems rather counterintuitive for government to create more barriers to achieving that very goal – in fact you could say it’s an attempt to solve a problem by creating an even bigger problem.
Today’s joint meeting of the Senate and House Finance Committees once again focused on reforming North Carolina’s tax code. The oft-repeated goal of the committees is to broaden the base and lower rates; in other words tax more economic activity but do so at a lower rate.
Today’s focus was on North Carolina’s personal income tax, and how the state defines income for tax purposes. Walter Nunnallee, tax professor at NCCU Law School, described how North Carolina uses “federal taxable income” as its basis for taxable income. That means that all of the federal exclusions and deductions the federal tax code uses also apply to North Carolina. But the state does have a smaller standard deduction meaning that slightly more of your income is taxable by the state than by the Feds.
The question, then, is how to broaden the income tax base? The primary way to do so would be to eliminate some of the credits and deductions. For instance, Fiscal Research head Barry Boardman identified 38 state credits and deductions that reduce state tax revenue by $1.2 billion. The largest of these exemptions was the itemized deduction for home mortgage interest, which reduced state revenue by $675 million; and others include gifts to charity, medical and dental deductible expenses and unreimbursed employee expenses.
While there appears to be significant pots of tax revenue to be gained by ending some of these exemptions, the political battle to do so would be brutal. Just imagine the outcry from homeowners and the real estate lobby if state lawmakers proposed ending the home mortgage deduction?
Every deduction, exemption and credit in the tax code was created to benefit a specific group. Powerful lobbyists are employed to protect these carve-outs, making them almost politically impossible to reverse.
If indeed the state did want to offer relief to specific groups or for specific activities, it would be much better to do it through budgetary spending rather than mucking up the tax code. Tax all similar economic activity the same, then if you want to offer relief to homeowners, for instance, send them money. This method would be much more transparent as it would be far easier to detect how much is being spent on these various items through the budget rather than the much more opaque and difficult to track method of tax deduction. Simplifying the tax code would also free up resources currently devoted to navigating the complex tax code – resources that could then be devoted to productive activity.