Your opportunity to thank the leadership of North Carolina comes Tuesday. Vote for your Democratic candidates to reward them for all that they have brought to you over the last several decades. Sure, there have been a few questionable issues such as the sneaking through of the Educational Lottery – that game of chance that promises to take care of the educational needs of every county in the state – or the mistakes of Meg Scott Phipps in taking money from a State fair promoter, or the Jim Black mistakes in selecting a company to run the lottery or representatives to sit on the Lottery board or maybe even the blank checks received from the optometrists in return for legislation requiring school kids to get eye examinations from optometrists before they can attend school. Mistakes such as these just happen. You have to admit that they are doing the best they can, trying to provide services to the poor, the illegals, and the children. Of course, it takes a lot of money to provide low-income daycare…uh, sorry, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and More At Four which has required them to raise taxes on everything from gasoline to chewing gum, from movie tickets to the liquor at the ABC store. Okay, they also raised taxes on your satellite TV and internet access and internet sales and a slew of other things but a growing state needs its funds. Besides, they can’t raise personal income tax or business taxes any more – they are already at or near the top in the Southeast! Just keep in mind that they turned a deficit budget into a budget that had a $2 billion surplus this past year. That is GREAT work – okay, maybe it was at our expense since it was our tax dollars but they have to be given credit for making it happen. Give them credit also for taking that $2 billion surplus and, instead of saving it for next year’s needs, giving the employees of N.C. government a pay increase during election year and also starting several new programs which will initially be budgeted by the surplus. Unfortunately, there is no money in next years budget for the new programs so it is already looking like a deficit budget for next year. But remember – the Democrats got us in this situation and they can get us out. Vote for the Democrats in your area to continue the North Carolina tradition of pay-as-you-go budgeting and pork barrel spending.
