Legislature’s budget — More comfort for the comfortable
The GOP-controlled House revealed their budget plan and it’s exactly what we expected: tax cuts for big corporations and underfunding education. The plan includes The House boasts about adding a small amount of money to NC scholarships, however, they are not providing adequate funding for our public schools and universities. Not only are they not providing adequate teacher pay raises or enough funding, but they also fail to mention lowering class sizes for grades K-3.
The House leadership is pulling a public relations full-court press on social media in backing the budget. In a series of slick, partisan illustrations, they trumpet small spending for scholarships for the children of veterans who died or were disabled in action and cutting the waiting list for pre-K programs. They boast about increasing funding for private school vouchers, cutting taxes $340 million and adding nearly $2 billion to the state’s “rainy-day” fund.7
More telling about the true needs of the state was the typo-riddled graphic bragging about the budget’s “priorities” tweeted out by House Rules Committee Chairman David Lewis of Harnett County.
What good is it to provide a small amount of additional scholarship money when public schools and universities are neglectfully underfunded? What credibility does a legislature have when it promises to fix, than fails to address at all, proper funding of its mandate to reduce class size in lower grades? Just like this year, local schools, hundreds of teachers, thousands of students and parents will be uncertain about their jobs and futures next spring.
How responsible is it to continue to spend millions on private school vouchers when there is practically no accountability or transparency in where the money goes nor how the students perform academically? Not to mention that some of the schools discriminate on admissions.
These vouchers amount to government handouts with no strings attached. You can’t make this stuff up.
