Perdue's Pitch Made No Sense

Perdue’s closing argument was that the General Assembly’s budget plan would do “generational damage” to state public schools. The argument made no sense.

RALEIGH (By John Hood, Carolina Journal Online) – If you are still wondering why North Carolina’s budget debate turned out the way it did – with a bipartisan coalition of state legislators overriding Gov. Beverly Perdue’s veto – here’s one way of thinking about it.

Perdue’s closing argument was that the General Assembly’s budget plan would do “generational damage” to North Carolina’s public schools. Although a few gullible editorialists repeated it without question, the argument made no sense. That’s why it convinced no one who wasn’t already on Perdue’s side in the first place.

As House Speaker Thom Tillis, a Republican from Mecklenburg County, subsequently explained in an interview with the 'Charlotte Business Journal', the difference in K-12 education spending between the governor’s plan and the legislature’s plan was less than a percentage point. (The difference in total General Fund spending, on all programs, was about two percentage points.) To assert “generational damage” from the legislature’s plan, then, required Gov. Perdue to attempt some fancy rhetorical footwork.