North Carolina’s new Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, finds himself in yet another tussle with the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly — this time over the crazy state budget for 2017-2019 that the legislature’s GOP supermajority is fast pushing into law.
But “crazy” hardly begins to describe that budget. Along with all the usual GOP features (yet more tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, amounting to Kansas-sized revenue cuts designed to plunge the state government into fiscal chaos) it includes a $1 million cut to the governor’s office budget (because he’s a Democrat), a whopping $10 million (10%) cut to the attorney general’s law enforcement budget (because ditto), and a massive increase in subsidies to privately operated ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ across the state, quadrupling their support by unwilling taxpayers.
Cooper has promised to veto the budget bill that now sits on his desk, but that will be a Pyrrhic victory at best: the state’s unconstitutionally elected Republican legislators can (and will) override his veto before wrapping up the legislature’s business early next month and going home for the rest of the year.
One feature of the new budget that has elicited particular scorn is the bill’s gross megatonnage of raw pork — line item giveaways to individual GOP legislators’ favorite pet projects within their districts, designed to curry Republican voters’ favor come the next election. There are so many howlers here that it’s hard to keep track — ranging from a $250,000 giveaway to NASCAR great and NC favorite son Richard Petty, to a downtown revitalization grant to tiny Cliffside, NC (population 611, and shrinking) whose ‘downtown’ consists of a Dollar General store.
We at Insightus have just taken a quick look at how all of these bribes pork giveaways (totaling $123 million by our reckoning) are distributed across the state, particularly focusing on the counties that are winners or losers and analyzing those counties’ racial and political demographics. Because, as commentator Rob Christensen has said, a budget like this one provides “a guide to the inner political psyche” of our elected representatives. So we thought it might be interesting to quantify that guide.
We began our analysis by tallying up all of the budget’s giveaways by county, across all of NC’s 100 counties. Looked at this way, the disparity is striking: the resulting list ranges from a high of $214 in pork-per-resident in tiny Perquimans County (population 13,335) to just ten cents per resident in the state’s largest and most heavily urban county, Mecklenburg (population: one million). And that doesn’t even count the 38 counties receiving no earmarked funds at all, including the state’s bluest county, Durham (population: 306,000 and home to sprawling Duke University).
Our demographic analysis of those winning and losing counties yielded some non-surprises, such as the observation that the biggest winners (averaging $19 per resident) were the state’s few urbanized counties that are home to more Republicans than Democrats — distinct outliers in this state where most urban areas are deep blue.
Also unsurprisingly, the state’s biggest losers in the GOP pork parade are urbanized counties with larger than average black populations, averaging just $7.20 per resident:
But what did surprise us was the identity of the state’s second-biggest losers — heavily Republican (and thus, overwhelmingly white) rural counties (of which there are no shortage here in NC) — receiving just $11.20 per resident, on average. Conventional wisdom holds that those counties’ voters are the NC GOP’s fervent and loyal base, and were largely responsible for powering Trump to victory in November, so it is pretty stunning to see Republican lawmakers thumbing their snouts at those same voters...who just never seem to learn that they’re voting against their own interests.
The full report (which, trust me, is a mercifully quick and easy read) is available on the Insightus blog, and some colorful Democratic commentary on NC’s new budget can be found on Twitter, hashtag #sooee (which, for all you metrosexuals out there, is the farmer’s traditional call for the pigs to come home).