Tax Cuts or Better Schools?
It’s a long-running debate with long-running impact on North Carolina: cut taxes or improve education?
This year, again, the Republican-controlled legislature is set on cutting taxes and starving public schools, even with a $3 billion-plus surplus that could significantly raise the quality of education.
For 60 years, the state made a series of different decisions.
They paid off. They made North Carolina a national leader in both education and economic growth.
You can trace the debate to February 1957, 66 years ago this month.
Governor Luther Hodges, a retired textile executive who was an industry-hunter, asked the legislature to cut taxes for corporations.
Hodges said that would attract industries that would increase tax revenues that would eventually help schools.
That is, trickledown.
A young Fayetteville lawyer who was planning to run for governor had a different idea. He was Terry Sanford.
Two weeks after Hodges made his proposal to the legislature, Sanford was to give a dull speech on constitutional revisions to Young Democrats in Winston-Salem.
He tossed that speech. Instead, he gave one denouncing the governor’s plan as “dangerously wrong.”
North Carolina should focus on raising education standards, he contended. Economic growth would follow.
Sanford ran on an education platform and was elected governor in 1960.
He raised teacher pay 20 percent and hired 2,800 new teachers. He provided new libraries, more textbooks, more school supplies and more clerical assistance. He built the community college system.
North Carolina took off. For 60 years, the state followed that course – under Democratic and Republican governors.
Since 2020, we’ve been back on the trickledown course: tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, skimping on schools and treating teachers like low-wage drudges.
This is a deliberate strategy.
Degrade and demean public schools.
Divert tax money and students to private schools.
Dump disadvantaged kids and kids with special needs on the public schools.
Then claim that public schools – or, as they call them, “government schools” – are failing.
It is, as Terry Sanford said, dangerously wrong.
Tax Cuts or Better Schools?
It’s a long-running debate with long-running impact on North Carolina: cut taxes or improve education?
This year, again, the Republican-controlled legislature is set on cutting taxes and starving public schools, even with a $3 billion-plus surplus that could significantly raise the quality of education.
For 60 years, the state made a series of different decisions.
They paid off. They made North Carolina a national leader in both education and economic growth.
You can trace the debate to February 1957, 66 years ago this month.
Governor Luther Hodges, a retired textile executive who was an industry-hunter, asked the legislature to cut taxes for corporations.
Hodges said that would attract industries that would increase tax revenues that would eventually help schools.
That is, trickledown.
A young Fayetteville lawyer who was planning to run for governor had a different idea. He was Terry Sanford.
Two weeks after Hodges made his proposal to the legislature, Sanford was to give a dull speech on constitutional revisions to Young Democrats in Winston-Salem.
He tossed that speech. Instead, he gave one denouncing the governor’s plan as “dangerously wrong.”
North Carolina should focus on raising education standards, he contended. Economic growth would follow.
Sanford ran on an education platform and was elected governor in 1960.
He raised teacher pay 20 percent and hired 2,800 new teachers. He provided new libraries, more textbooks, more school supplies and more clerical assistance. He built the community college system.
North Carolina took off. For 60 years, the state followed that course – under Democratic and Republican governors.
Since 2020, we’ve been back on the trickledown course: tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, skimping on schools and treating teachers like low-wage drudges.
This is a deliberate strategy.
Degrade and demean public schools.
Divert tax money and students to private schools.
Dump disadvantaged kids and kids with special needs on the public schools.
Then claim that public schools – or, as they call them, “government schools” – are failing.
It is, as Terry Sanford said, dangerously wrong.