No accounting for politics?
For those of you who missed it, I had a story in Sunday's paper about the the state auditor's office and the governor's folks having a discussion over how to track lottery proceeds.
Basically, Auditor Les Merritt, a Republican, was asking Easley's folks to agree on a method for determining how much - if at all - lottery proceeds benefited education.
Easley, a Democrat, wrote back to Merritt and said, in essence, don't worry yourself about this. It'll be real obvious whether lottery money is boosting our education spending or not.
Merritt wrote back to say that he thought it was just dandy that Easley planned to put all the money in education but that he was still worried that in a year or two it may be real difficult to tell one way or the other.
Let's acknowledge up front that because Merritt is a Republican and Easley is a Democrat there some ready-made political tension here. (Privately, at least one of Easley's folks suggested to me that this must just be some sort of political grandstanding by the auditor. The auditors folks say no, that Merritt is genuine in his interest here.) And not being an accountant, I don't know if the level of detail Merritt's folks are after is really necessary or the answer is really as simple as Easley claims.
Merritt is asking for details of specific education programs that will get lottery funding. His stated worry is that programs that receive both lottery and tax dollars could confuse the issue down the line.
Easley's camp argues that you simply need to look at the over-all level of state spending going into education programs. That, plus that fact that the lottery proceeds will be going to new or relatively new programs should make the lottery dollars' easy to track, the governor argues.
Here's the rub: As I reported back last month, one of the biggest gripes about lottery is that years down the road is that lottery money really doesn't end up boosting education in the long run.
So here's Merritt realizing that this will be a question he'll be asked next year or the year after or maybe the year after that and essentially saying, "hey guys, let's come up with an agreed upon way to calculate the answer."
Even if the way he wants to go about it is backwards and too much on a micro-level - as Easley's folks contend - maybe that's not a horrible suggestion. Maybe the answer can be as simple as Easley's folks say, but if everyone agrees up front how to do the calculation than no one can complain down the line that one side or the other is doing some "new math" to get the answer they want.
Of course, my inner-skeptic says it’s more useful politically for Democrats and Republicans alike, lottery supporters and opponents of all different political stripes, to have the issue a bit clouded. All sides then can down the line say "See. See! See!! We were right," using whatever evidence they want to make whatever case they want.