Budget? We don't need no stinkin' budget...for now
From a story set for Sunday's paper:
RALEIGH — Taxpayers should have woken up today knowing how the state government plans to spend North Carolina’s $20 billion-plus budget.Instead, as the state’s fiscal year begins, legislators have retreated to their districts for the weekend after passing a stop-gap spending resolution. That measure keeps the government running for 30 days but does not address the biggest questions facing the state.
Click here for the full story.
There's not a huge amount for me to add here, since this was mainly a story to catch the home folks up who haven't been slavishly following the AP or hanging out at the Tavern.
The really funny thing to me is how much agreement there is among all this disagreement. (More after the jump.)
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Almost to a person among Democrats (who run both the House and Senate), there is agreement that the state should take over the cost of Medicaid, that the state needs to get some sort of revenue back from the counties to do that and that the counties need some option to replace said revenue.
You'd think with that much of a framework in place, they could clean up the margins of the tax debate and celebrate the Fourth of July by playing Rock-Paper-Scissors over appropriation items. Obviously, you'd think wrong.
The conventional wisdom has been that once the Medicaid and finance items were out of the way, the rest of the budget would be relatively easy. But my faith in that wisdom is wavering just a bit, given the pitched battle over this relatively small patch of ideological territory.
The bright side? I don't look like a total doofus for saying it could be "a long hot June, or maybe longer" here in Raleigh.
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