Conservative Fiscal Policies Put North Carolina Near Top…Again

RALEIGH – This decade has seen a lot of conservative change in North Carolina – cutting regulations, lowering taxes on hardworking families, and constructing budgets that live within their means.

The result has been a buoyant economy, disappearing debts, and a fiscal health that implies the Old North State could weather an economic storm that will surely come at some point.

Moody’s, the credit rating and financial analysis company, has confirmed the latter with their most recent “stress test” for states’ fiscal health. North Carolina is one of just 16 states that passed the test with flying colors, and, make no mistake, conservative fiscal policies are to thank for it.

The stress test applies potential economic recession scenarios, ranging from moderate to severe, to analyze each state’s fiscal readiness for an inevitable downturn.

The analysis considers the ratio of each state’s savings reserves to its spending commitments and measures the predicted impact of a recession on tax revenues. State budget flexibility and planning are also factored into the comparisons.

The Moody’s Analytics study groups states into three categories of preparedness: sixteen states that “have the funds they need,” nineteen states that “have most of the funds they need,” and fifteen states that “have significantly less funds than they need.”

North Carolina has the funds needed to endure an economic downturn because Republican majorities on Jones Street have persistently passed budgets that prioritize debt reduction, such as the more than $2 billion debt to the Unemployment Insurance Fund that was paid off ahead of schedule, and a focus on building reserves in the ‘Rainy-Day Fund.’

Gov. Roy Cooper (D) has maligned conservatives laudable actions to build reserves, vetoing the first budget presented to him and calling for less savings and more spending. If the legislature was under Democrat control, rest assured that North Carolina would not be ranking in the top third of states that have the funds to handle a recession.

Instead, North Carolina would be in a precarious fiscal position, taxes would be high, and taxpayer money would be flying out the door toward misguided Big Government initiatives.

While Democrats can beat the drum of class warfare and call everything that moves a ‘racist’, the numbers don’t lie and North Carolina’s numbers look so good because governing philosophies built on a foundation of less government and more liberty are morally and tangibly superior to the Leftists’ ‘cradle to grave’ statism.