GIVE IT BACK: Amid Budget Standoff, NC Legislature Announces Near Billion Dollar Revenue Surplus

RALEIGH – It has become an annual exercise to tally the number of surplus millions North Carolina tax coffers collect over planned spending levels. For half a decade, revenue surpluses have paid back debts, filled rainy day funds, and funded disaster relief efforts. These surpluses came after Republicans steadily and significantly cutting taxes and getting the State’s fiscal house in order, despite Democrats fear mongering all the while that the tax reforms would lead to revenue shortfalls and credit downgrades.

This fiscal year the estimated surplus is not a small amount of money – $896 million surplus for last fiscal year. That fiscal year actually ended a few weeks ago, and a new budget has yet to be passed, but that’s another story.

From the Carolina Journal:

“[…] Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown, R-Onslow, who also chairs that body’s budget committee, used a news release to announce the findings.

Brown said personal income-tax payments ran $150 million above expectations, and sales tax collections were $74 million higher than anticipated.

Brown used the opportunity to zing Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who has slammed the tax-and-spending policies of the Republican-led legislature.

“After Governor Cooper’s office predicted a $600 million shortfall for this year, responsible Republican budget policies actually produced a $900 million surplus. The same people who made wildly inaccurate doom-and-gloom predictions are now telling us that Medicaid expansion won’t cost the state a dime, and they’re holding the entire budget hostage over that one issue. They have no credibility.” […]”

The success of tax reforms and relatively conservative fiscal policies is glaring example of Republican policy in action, and Democratic prognostications proving false yet again.

One might think, though, when ‘The State’ is consistently taking hundreds of millions of dollars too much from taxpayers each year — so much so that politicians brag about it — perhaps the lawmakers can really celebrate their conservative win the right way and…GIVE IT BACK.

Read more from Carolina Journal here.

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