There's no meat in this shepherd's pie:
The Connect NC bond allocates $1.3 billion or 66 percent of the $2 billion bond issue to universities and community colleges, reflecting Gov. Pat McCrory’s commitment to education. The bond issue is being proposed because most major capital projects such as new educational buildings, particularly those at our universities and community colleges, cannot be paid out of the annual operating budget without a serious effect on students.
It has been 15 years since the last bond issue was authorized to update our state’s infrastructure, and since then North Carolina’s population has grown by 2 million. This growth has resulted in significant infrastructure needs from the mountains to the coast.
Bolding mine. If that is the case, it's a manufactured problem. Capital projects have been funded (sometimes well, sometimes not) out of the annual budget for decades, paid for upfront, and those expenditures did not seriously impact other educational funding. What did (and does) hurt education funding is low revenues, first from the Recession, and now from the ill-advised and ideologically-driven tax cuts for the wealthy. Creating a crisis and then pointing to that crisis to justify other mistakes is sophomoric and reckless behavior, and progressives would be wise to avoid supporting such efforts. As James has mentioned before and Andrew (maybe unknowingly) validated in the 2nd paragraph above, we're likely not going to be able to dip into this bond well again, anytime soon. Doing it wrong (or only partly right) is not an option we should be considering. And what's missing from the current bond proposal is critical:
http://ift.tt/1VWSsZV
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