State of the State

Oh, boy! The N.C. General Assembly is back! We still have a Democratic majority (which I think we've had my whole lifetime), and we've got a brand-new Democrat governor, Bev Perdue (continuing the tradition of Democratic governors in all but four years of my lifetime). I love Democrats, as you know. But I also love competition, which usually makes for a better result. And that's the problem with my state's Democrats. They don't have real competition, and as a result their ideas are sometimes........well, kinda lacking.

Case in point: Rep. Larry Womble, from right here in Forsyth County, continues to push for reparation payments to the victims of NC's eugenics laws, as he has for many years. I applaud Womble for bringing attention to the law that, until the 1970s, allowed the state to forcibly sterilize people (many of them still children) whom it determined were "unfit" to bear children. There was an undeniable element of racism in many of those cases, but even setting that aside - it's absolutely appalling, stomach-churning, to think of a room with a board of government officials deciding whether or not the state should cut out a woman's reproductive system against her will. (Irony of ironies - at the same time that many of those same officials were working overtime to outlaw abortion rights.) About 2,600 of those victims are still living. Womble wants direct reparations to the tune of $20,000 per, at a total cost of $56 million. Gov. Perdue's new budget proposes $250,000 to start a foundation for their support. I prefer the governor's idea - I'm a non-profit person, and I like that a foundation would be able to solicit funds beyond the stae's budget. Plus, Womble's $20 grand is both too insufficient for the victims and too pricy for the state in total.

Womble also proposes a bill that would mandate any company wanting a state contract to disclose any profits it made from the slave trade. Hoo, boy. This is one of those things that sounds great in the abstract but, when you start trying to apply it to the real world, starts getting more and more problematic. Let's go ahead and stipulate Womble's argument that slavery was terrible and everyone should critically examine its consequences. Okay, now...How do we enforce this? Does the state employ an army of researchers to investigate every contractor's history to make sure they're telling the truth? All of my employers have been museums or colleges, so we tend to be big on the whole archive thing - but what about a construction company, or a bank? What about the businesses that didn't use slave labor themselves, but later acquired those that did? (I can think of a couple right now...For instance, the city's visitor center is in the Brookstown Mill area, along with Brookstown Inn - buildings that were part of a mill operated by a slaveowner. My alma mater's endowment was started with a gift from that same slaveowner's family. If you're wearing a t-shirt made by Hanes, congrats, you owe Womble a letter. Does Michael Jordan profit from slavery, too?) Why stop at 1865? Certainly NC businesses exploited African Americans for many years after (as were white workers, but let's not talk about them for the moment). All around, a very poorly conceived bill. Knowing that Womble is an intelligent person, it's that much more frustrating to see him wasting tine on this fruitless, pointless vote-grabber ephemera knowing that one out of ten adults in our region are unemployed.

Which brings me to Gov. Perdue's budget. Bev wants to hike taxes on tobacco products by $1. Our state has some of the lowest tobacco taxes in the country. (Side note: I stopped for gas today and the station had a sign at the register apologizing for the increased cost. Apparently tobacco companies have already upped their prices in anticpation of the federal tax that won't take effect for another few months.) Mmmmmmm..........again, a "sin tax" sounds good - smoking is bad, hell yeah they should pay more! - but I hestitate once I read the fine print. We're not talking about a tax to discourage behavior (which I'm not convince the government should do anyway...). We're not talking about taxing smokes to create revenue for anti-smoking programs, or to pay for the health-related costs of tobacco abuse, both of which I could get behind. But taxing cigarettes to pay for roads and teacher salaries? That just seems like bad policy. What if higher taxes inspire scores of people to quit smoking? Great! Now we have less revenue for those roads and teachers. Ooops. I feel like this is an extremely short-term solution.