School secrets and the looming NC budget battle (06-03-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. It's Tuesday, It's noon, and that means we speak with Andrew Dunn. He is a publisher over at long Leaf Politics longleafpol dot com and a contributing columnist to The Charlotte Observer. Andrew, how are you, sir? Oh, I'm fantastic. How are you? I'm not quite fantastic, but I'm okay. So that's good. So you've got a bunch of pieces up at long Leaf Politics and over at the Charlotte Observer as well. So let's start there. At the paper. You've got a piece that public I guess yesterday two new incidents show why North Carolina should not let schools keep secrets, and one of them is this rgerie Kel High School principal who was suspended with pay back on May second. And then there's the Randolph Middle School principal who was also suspended, although it also seems like it may be related to her being attacked by a parent. So that's like, that's a rough day. You get suspended with pay but also strangled in your office by an angry parent. So what did this prompt that? What? These two cases rather prompted your op ed? But you're using it to, as we always like to see, offer a solution here for the public and parents who don't actually know why these two principles were suspended. Yeah, exactly. And both of those incidents came to light within hours of each other, really, and they're very similar. You know, the principles essentially go missing. Parents eventually start asking what's going on. The school sends out a note saying that they're away from some time, and you know, to their credit. Journalists in the city, you know, ask cms put in public records requests. But all they're able to find out is that they were suspended. There's no details on why, for how long, anything like that. And when you dig into it, it's because the state public records law doesn't require anything other than that, all the public is entitled to know is that someone was suspended, not why. And that's actually fairly unusual when you look around the country. You know, every state has its own public records laws, and most of them require a little bit more detail, you know, to at least give the general reasons or length of time for the suspension. And so it'd be a relatively easy fix for the General Assembly to go in and update public records laws just to re w are a little more transparency there. You know, in my mind, you know, I've got four kids, several of them at CMS, and you know, principles really do matter. I mean, they're they're public officials that are highly visible, you know, really influential in a school, and you know, parents really just deserve to know what's going on with them. Yeah. I thought you had a really good line where you say it's more than just communication, it's about accountability. It's about whether families are treated as partners or bystanders in public education. And that is like that is I think sort of the dividing line in where a lot of conservatives that really kind of blew up during the pandemic, where parents started pushing back on some of the stuff saying well, well, well wait a minute. You know, this is my kid and I want to be informed of what it is that you're teaching them. And you saw a lot of pushback from school systems that you know, want to just kind of keep the parents at arm's length. And you're not part of the your kids education when they're in the school, and so you don't get a say you don't need to know this stuff, we'll take care of it all. And what are the chances then that you could get the General Assembly to change this law because you mentioned this Government Transparency Act of twenty twenty five and it did not make the crossover deadline. So what you're thinking gutting stuff instead? Like you you find a bill that's not going anywhere and you rip out the language and insert some other language. I mean, that's always possible. It could even be part of the budget bill. You know. There if the General Assembly wants to do something, they tend to find a way to do it. True, you know, to your point earlier, you know the General Assembly has done a lot a lot of good work around you know, parental rights. You know, the Parents Bill of Rights I was a big proponent of that passed a year or two ago. That's given parents a lot more visibility into what's going on at their kids' school. And this is you know, it's related, it's not obviously related. And that's why I wanted to write the op ed is to kind of, you know, to tie those two things together. Let's shift gears and look at the election twenty twenty six, because it's never too early to start looking a year ahead for the campaigns. And Justice Anita Earles is going to be on the ballot. She is one of two Democrats. Alison Riggs just fought that long fight with Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger. She maintains her seat on the Supreme Court. And Anita Earls is the other Democrat appointed, well, she was appointed initially, she did win her election, but she's going to be up for reelection next year. And you are really looking forward to this race, I take it. No, I am absolutely dreading it. And you know the. Reason why I wrote that piece is we're just you know, Anita Earl. Justice Earls is starting to hit the stump speeches. You know, she had an event in Durham where she posted some footage of and you know, her messaging is exactly what you would think it would be. It's all about threats to democracy and you know, democrats on the Supreme Court as you know, the last hope of freedom, and it just makes me roll my eyes. I hate that kind of rhetoric. You know, it's really seeped into kind of all corners of our nation's political life, you know, really apocalyptic language, and I think it does a disservice to everyone, and I think voters are getting tired of it. But because of this huge, long debacle we just had with Jefferson Griffin, I think that voters are going to be a little bit more receptive to it. And I think Justice Earls is just going to raise an unbelievable amount of money. I went in and looked at some of the dollar figures, and the cost of a Supreme Court seat has really gone up a ton over the past ten years. You know, the Sherry Beasley Paul Newby race, which really wasn't that ago. That was twenty twenty, you know, that was a three million dollar race. Alison Riggs raised five million herself just this past year, and Jefferson Griffin had two million on top of that. I think Earls is going to just blow that out of the water. It's going to be a ten million dollar Supreme Court race, so the airwaves will be packed with this doom and gloom, death of democracy stuff. Do you think the cost of the races is tied to the increase in lawfare essentially? I think that's a big part of it. I think also, you know, national interest groups have really set their sights on the Supreme Court seats in North Carolina. If you look at Alison Riggs donations in this past cycle, pages and pages, thousands and thousands of them were you know, they show up as aggregated individual contributions and basically what that means is, you know it's Act Blue. Yes, when people are clicking on a Facebook ad and donating ten twenty dollars and that's going to be ramped up really high in this race, and it's a great way to get millions of dollars that you don't know where it's coming from. Yeah, yeah, we've covered the Act Blue scandal in my I mean, to me, it's obviously a scandal, but it does not get nearly the attention it should. But at least they I think they did put in. They put in a safeguard that they had been ignoring for years prior, so I don't know, maybe it's a little bit better. Also, your talk about the you know, this language of the apocalypse in all of these campaign stump speeches. My concern with that as well is that it creates a permission structure for basically anything, because if if the alternative is utter apocalypse, then you're justified almost in doing really anything to prevent that. It's like the it's like the comparisons to Hitler and Nazis. It's it's like, well, if you're trying to prevent Hitler from taking over, you can really do just about anything. And that's the concern I have with that kind of language as well. Now, absolutely, yeah, on the House or on the budget side of things, we've been kind of in this lull between Memorial Day and now they're coming back and you've got the House with its budget proposal, you've got the Senate with its budget proposal. Both of them are Republican controlled, but their budget proposals are are pretty different. They spend the same amount of money, but they do it differently. So what is you talk about in your piece over at long leave politics. The difference in philosophy between the House approach and the Senate approach. So what's the difference in the philosophy. Yeah, I mean there's always been a difference in a House and a Senate budget. You know, the Senate tends to be a little bit more conservative, you know, with lower spending levels, lower taxes. The House has always been a little bit more spending. You know. The House is more willing to, you know, allocate a little bit more or to so that sort of thing. I think a lot of it has to do with how many more members there are in the House, and everybody wants their own little little project to be a part of the budget. But this year it's it's unusually divergent between the House and the Senate. You know, as you mentioned, the top line spending figure is the same. The big difference is on taxes. You know, the Senate proposes actually accelerating the tax cuts. There's been tax cuts planned. You know, it's going to keep the personal income text is set to steadily drop over the next couple of years. The House proposal actually pauses that and requires the state to have higher levels of revenue before taxes drop again. Where the Senate just goes full on, we're actually going to lock in some of these tax cuts. And because of that, you know, the House has more spending. You know, it has the fifty thousand dollars starting salary for teachers, where the Senate doesn't. Those are kind of the big differences. But you know, one of the other really unusual things that I'm picking up on this year is the reaction to the two budgets. You know, the Senate put out their budget first a couple months ago and there wasn't much reaction at all. But when the House dropped this budget, I mean, it got all sorts of support from from all corners, including from Democrats, which is just a completely different dynamic from what we've seen. You know, there was you never heard of Governor Cooper praise a Republican budget, so that was super unusual to see. Right And in fact, the Club for Growth, and I've got a copy of it, they went after they said, hey, we're gonna you know, we're gonna score this these budgets, and we're not going to be cool if you guys do this House budget and you say in your piece that they threatened to blackball anybody who voted for it, but then they quickly backed down, so I did not see the backing down. What happened? There any explanation given for that? No, I mean everything just kind of quietly went away. Yeah, I think the post got deleted and haven't heard a word about it since. I don't know who was picking up the phone and saying don't do this. But I don't think that that will be a factor in the compromise and. Negotiation, yeah, which are underway or about to be underway soon, and we'll be following it. Andrew Dunn, I appreciate your time as always, sir, great work as always, and we'll talk to you next week. All right, thank you, thank you. That's Andrew Dunn. He is a contributing columnist at the Charlotte Observer, and he is the publisher of long Leaf Politics. That website is longleafpol dot com. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So the GOP controlled house in North Carolina, the General Assembly. The House passed its budget plan by a vote of ninety three to twenty and that earned some and that included by the way, the three included twenty seven Democrats, which is more than half of the Democrat caucus. Right only twenty votes against the plan, even earning support from the House Minority Leader Robert Reeves. The Democrat leader, described the GOP authored proposal as a quote negotiating document that's better than a plan proposed by the Senate. He said, quote, I voted for the House budget understanding that there are a lot of policies I disagree with and hope to see removed during the conference period. You think that's going to happen? Okay, he says. The House is serious about governing this state, and it is up to the Senate to come to the table in good faith. Now, I would be curious. I would be curious to see if the Senate were to just say, okay, House will do your plan, and then see how many Democrats actually vote for the final version if it were exactly the same. Would they still vote for the budget if it were exactly the same as the one that they just voted for. Broadly speaking, this is according to Will Duran, Emily Walkinhorst, and Paul Speckt at WRL. Broadly speaking, the House favors larger state employee raises than the Senate, more state job cuts, and smaller income tax cuts. Right, So those are sort of like the key takeaways here you've got smaller income tax cuts, more state jobs eliminated, but larger employee raises. Its budget plan proposes new types of tax reforms, like the return of the Baptist schools sales tax holiday gimmick. That's what that is. That's a gimmick. But on this one weekend, everybody gets to shop for stuff and there's no sales tax. Also no tax on tips. The Senate plan doesn't have that. State Representative Terry Brown, Democrat from Mecklenburg, said he appreciated Republican efforts to include some initiatives that Democrats have sought for years, particularly the back to school sales tax holiday. See, because Democrats love imposing taxes and then giving carve outs. It's like the tax incentives, and Republicans do this too, in order to attract new businesses. Right at least, Republicans also say we should keep taxes low for all businesses so the existing ones can benefit as well from tax policy, rather than having high corporate tax and then giving car vouts and forgiveness and you know, incentives for businesses to relocate here. But Democrats, so that it's obvious why they like the sales tax holiday, they want a sales tax, and then they want to be able to, you know, give people a jubilee for certain periods of the year. This is Terry Brown again, Democrat, Mecklenberg County state representative. He praised the House Republicans for taking measures to potentially avoid a revenue shortfall. So this has been projected out in I forget how long, I think it's about four years or something away that there is this projection from the legislative staff that there's going to be a budget shortfall, that the revenue is not going to keep up with expenses in like four or six years, whatever it is. And so Democrats have dare I say pounced seized Maybe they have seized on this projection in order to argue against any kind of tax cut, even though the Republican philosophy is you cut the taxes and that generates more economic activity, which increases revenue. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 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The chambers the House and Senate up in Raleigh. They do agree on some issues, according to WRAL, such as a plan to free up more than one hundred million dollars to help pay for tax cuts by slashing spending on higher education and requiring universities to raise tuition. They both also seek to eliminate state programs aimed at helping black, Hispanic and other minority communities, with Republican politicians saying they want to root out pro diversity efforts within state government. Pro diversity efforts. That's the way WRAL frames the uprooting of the racisty DEI regime. Let's see, is there anything else that is a very lengthy piece? Okay? So then I go to the Carolina Journal. This a piece by Brianna Kramer Carolina Journal dot com. Like the Senate proposal from April, the House budget from May will cost the same amount of money sixty six billion dollars over the next two fiscal years because they do their budgets in two year cycles. And just real quick that we're in the long session right now, which is when they construct the two year biennium the budget, and then next year they do a short session where they make minor adjustments to the budget theoretically, and they're supposed to just do like some cleanup work. It's not supposed to be a long session, although in years past the short session has gone on quite long. Which I would be in favor of an actual calendar, to put everybody on a calendar. And I'm not just saying that because my last name is Calendar, which sounds a lot like calendar but is spelled totally differently. But I think it would be helpful to put some deadlines in place, much like we have the crossover deadline, when the House and the Senate have to have all their bills filed and then cross over to the other chamber. It forces the lawmakers to get stuff done. So sometimes these sessions go on and on and on because there isn't a specified end date. Anyway, the House aims to bolster pay from any taxpayer funded jobs to do so. The House plan reallocate savings from government efficiency efforts like defunding DEI programs. See that's another way that you could report what WRAL just told you. That'll bring in over ten million dollars in a forthcoming amendment. They also plan to instruct agencies to cut a percentage of vacant government positions just don't fill them. So nobody's getting fired, they're just eliminating positions. The House proposal would give a two and a half percent across the board pay raise for state agency employees, community college staff, and UNC system personnel. It also provides state retirees with a one percent cost of living bonus in year one and a two percent bonus in year two. Teachers they would see an eight point seven percent increase in their salary over the course of the two year budget cycle, and so by the end of that two year cycle they would be at fifty six thousand, five five hundred and ninety three dollars a year. So fifty six and a half thousand dollars for the average or sorry for the starting teacher salary, no experience starting teacher pay fifty six and a half thousand dollars. The House plan would also make North Carolina the number one state in the Southeast for entry level teacher pay, which will then, of course prompt outrage from the veteran teachers. What about teachers that have been here so long. See, when they do one chunk at a time, the chunk that is not addressed in the current chunk, they get outraged because this happened, and the left and the media. But I repeat myself, they they always they used the group that didn't get the big bump this year to you know, pummel the Republicans over. But then the next time around, the Republicans go back and do them like in this case, it would be the veteran teachers, and then they would get an increase. This way, it's not all one big, massive budget hit all at one time. The plan would also restore master's pay to reward teachers who have pursued graduate school. The additional pay for teachers was previously funded up until twenty thirteen. Republicans got rid of this additional pay for masters. And I think that's for the masters because I think they did reinstate the National Board certified pay increase because at the time this was twelve years ago. They were pointing to studies that showed the teachers who get master's degrees don't actually have there's no correlation to improved student outcomes. So why would you pay to have teachers get master's degrees just to give them more money when it doesn't actually improve the performance of the students. The House wants to slow down the pace of income tax cuts scheduled for the next few years. This is going to be a big riff between the two plans. Back when the Republicans took over control of the General Assembly in twenty ten, they won the election in twenty ten under maps, the Democrats drew themselves. I always point that out. They won. They then took office in twenty eleven, and one of the first things they did people dubbed it Rucho nomics, named after Bob Ruco, state senator from Mecklenburg County, And he said, we're going to we're going to drive down the income tax rates, personal income tax and corporate income tax. We're going to drive down these rates. And Bob always wanted to get to zero. And so they said, okay, we're going to have triggers, right, So if we have a certain revenue growth, we have certain economic activity right that we're not running deficits, then that will trigger the next cut of like a quarter point or half a point. And so the triggers that are fixing to take hold or sorry, fixing the tackle, the Senate wants to keep those, and the House wants to pump the brakes on them. The personal income tax rate is scheduled to go from four and a quarter percent down to three point ninety nine, so a quarter point dropper twenty six point twenty six, and then the possibility of further reductions would be down to two forty nine two point four nine percent, so a point and a half by the year twenty twenty nine. But again this is only if the triggers are hit. The budget would exempt the first five thousand dollars in tipped wages from personal income tax. Leaders also want to reinstate the back to school sales tax holiday weekend. That's why Democrats are in love with it. Also, in line with disaster recovery, the House wants to replenish the sale savings reserve that has been depleted through recovery aid to help western North Carolina since Hurricane Helene. The state savings reserve balance has decreased from four point seventy five billion down to three point six billion. Both the House and the Senate recommend replenishing the account to its pre Hellene number. Other provisions DMV privatization pilot program, Oh please please, disaster recovery redirects NC innovation funding, which I was never really sold on. That program funding would be diverted then to ongoing relief and recovery efforts. They also want to throw fifty million in grants to improve safety and security in schools across North Carolina. By the way, the DMV privatization pilot, it would fund dozens of new positions at the DMV while authorizing a pilot program to test private license renewal services. And finally, from the Carolina Journal, the two chambers, you will now begin negotiating a final budget. And once the House passes its budget, which it did, the Senate then will have to vote not to concur or to concur. They're not going to concur, and so they're going to go into negotiations what's called the Conference committee, and we'll see what happens from there. All right, So spring is here a time of renewal and celebrations. You've got graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and the special days for mom and dad. Your family's making memories that are going to last a lifetime. But let me ask you, are all of those treasured moments from days gone by? Are they hidden away on old VCR tapes, eight millimeter films, photos slides? Are they preserved? Because over time, these precious memories can fade and deteriorate, losing the magic of yesterday. At Creative Video, they help you protect what matters most. Their expert team digitizes your cherished family moments and transfers them onto a USB drive, freezing them in time so they can be enjoyed for generations to come. I urge you do not wait until it's too late this spring, celebrate your past. Visit Creative Video today and let them preserve your legacy with the love and care that it deserves. Creative Video Preserving Family Memories since nineteen ninety seven. Located in mint Hill, just off four eighty five. Mail orders are accepted to get all the details that create a video dot com. Let's head over to the phones and speak with Bain. Hello, Bane, welcome to the show. Thank you, pe sir. Question for you all right, How are vacancy's factored into the budgeting process. You always hear that a municipality will be short two hundred and fifty police officers or short one thousand teachers. Is then't there a surplus? Well if they right, if they go unfilled right for the whole year, then the municipality, like from a municipality, it may very well reallocate the funding someplace else, Okay, so that for just that year, like towards the end of the year, they may end up with, you know, surplus revenue that was not used to pay for the vacant positions, and so then they could turn around and spend it on like a one time spend or put it into savings or something. But for the teachers, it's a little bit different because the teacher allocation numbers are based on attendance on I think they do the twentieth day count, so on day twenty of all new school years, that's where that's how they allocate your funding levels, is how many kids are in school on the twentieth day of school? Got it? Okay? Thank you? All right? Yes, sir, I mean I think that's true. I could be completely wrong, but I mean that's what I would do. So there's an organization called the Carolina Partnership for Reform North Carolina CPRNC dot org is their website, And this is a conservative organization, and they're calling this House budget a Republican sponsored tax hike, and they said having no budget deal is a better outcome than this one. Raising taxes was such a bright red political line for North Carolina Republicans that when faced with a three point seven billion dollar state budget deficit during the Reform majority's very first budget cycle, as I mentioned back in twenty eleven, Conservatives allowed a scheduled one sense sales tax reduction and scheduled reduction of the personal and corporate income taxes to go into effect. Democrats had put in place these quote unquote temporary taxes, and then they kept extending them. Because the Democrats had built budgets that were structurally deficit laiden, they could not figure out how to stop spending, because the Democrat philosophy is, see penny, spend a penny, and oh, we get this revenue in this year, let's use it for ongoing operations, Like well, well, no, we don't know if the revenue next year is going to be as it is this year. What if there's a recession, Right, you want to grow your way out of these deficits. That's the Republican philosophy. Well at the state level, and well until now so Republican House Speaker at the time Tom Tillis and Senate President pro Tem Philberger correctly called Democrat Governor Bev Purdues planned to delay those tax cuts a tax increase. Right, These things were scheduled to sunset, and she was like, don't let them sunset. And they said, well, that's a tax increase. Well, the same mentality then should apply now, right. The reform majority in the legislature adopted a two pronged philosophy on taxes, Rutronomics, named after Bob Rujo, Senate Finance Committee chairman. The first part was that taxes like the income tax or the franchise tax, these things penalized earning, wealth, generation, and holding assets. And they said that's unfair and a disincentivized investment, disincentivized productivity as well as work. Unlike income taxes, sales and excise taxes that tax consumption and spending were fairer because they do not disincentivise investment. Productivity and work. So that's the first part of the philosophy. The second part was that tax policies should not pick winners and losers. A single low tax rate across the board to a broad tax base was the fairest and most pro growth state tax policy. And to this end, legislators eliminated hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars worth of tax loopholes and carve outs in order to flatten and reduce North Carolina's tax rates. And that philosophy paid enormous dividends for our state economy. It increased our state GDP. Family incomes have been rising over the last decade. We end up as the top or one of the top states in the nation for business by Forbes, US news sites, Selection magazines right all as a result of the conservative approach, North Carolina went from having the highest income taxes in the region to the lowest income taxes in the region. And so now you've got states that are copying us, And now you've got the House budget that is looking to slow down this reform effort. And so what they're saying is a vote for a budget proposal that increases personal income taxes on North Carolinians by over two billion dollars. The whole policy principle of the Reform majority, as they called themselves, that's now in peril. The House increases the personal income tax triggers by over three billion dollars this year and by a staggering seven billion in later years to ensure that North Carolina taxpayers will pay far more in personal income taxes than they would if the scheduled cuts in current law take effect. It's a tax increase according to these conservatives. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.