North Carolina has something of a budget crisis going on. Not as severe as California’s, but one where there are a lot of tax proposals being floated as potential solutions. Here are some of the ones I’ve heard since mid-June:

• A $0.40 (or so) per-ticket tax increase for movies
• A one-percent temporary sales tax increase
• The taxation of internet-purchases where a North Carolina resident is present in the sale as an affiliate marketer. Amazon dropped their affiliate program in NC over the proposal.
• A $0.50 per-pack increase on cigarettes.
• A percentage increase in excise tax on alcohol
• Added sales taxes to services like software downloads (iTunes purchases) and personal services.

These items may, or may not be in a budget passed by the legislature. I’m curious about why these particular tax proposals make sense, or do not. I’m motivated by three factors:

• I’m a business owner, and I’m very interested in what might be coming that will affect how I operate my business.
• It speaks to the part of me that got a journalism degree 10 years ago.
• I like making sense of data.

The News & Observer has an ongoing series, The Generous Assembly about how various programs and practices consume a large amount of resources. That’s a start at what I’m looking for.

I’m not approaching this with the assumption that all government spending is good or bad. I do want to know if we are getting our money’s worth. I want to know if there’s a better way to do things. I want to know what the special-interest obstacles are and the motivations behind them. I’m not interested in getting angry at anyone. I’m not interested in political gamesmanship. Talking points do not interest me. I want well-sourced information to make an informed evaluation.

Here’s an incomplete list of questions I’m interested in seeing addressed:

Is the spending we are trying to pay for effective spending?

• Are we paying for things that we shouldn’t be?
• Are there programs – Global TransPark comes to mind – that have not met their stated goals?
• Is there a possibility those programs could be fixed?
• Is there good process to determine if a program is ineffective and shut it down?

Do these tax increases make sense?

• Are these items that are convenient to tax because they’re harder to justify?
• Because some of them are purely discretionary?
• Because they’ll make a meaningful dent?
• Are there alternative tax structures to examine?

Is there an alternate way of resolving the issue?

• Could we spend less money?
• How?
• What programs would be affected? Are we talking about eliminating kindergarten to make that happen? (Yes, hyperbole, but consequences are important considerations)

Is this the best possible solution?

• Are we getting the state’s financial house on better footing or merely staving-off disaster?
• If we’re just staving-off disaster, what do we really need to do to set things right?

How is this going to affect me?

• How much are these tax increases going to cost me?
• Are these increases offset by anything?

Answering

Two late-evening tweets got a couple of responses, with one link to NC State’s Budget Central. The other is to the Sunshine Review of the NC state budget. (Thanks, @mockernut)

I don’t have comments here, but if you find information that would add to everyone’s understanding of the budget and tax situation, write-it-up and tag it with ‘budgetnc’ on your blog or with ‘#budgetnc’ on Twitter. Thanks in advance for helping me understand our state’s situation at least a little bit better.