Just how rigid and intransigent an ideological disposition it requires to look at $6.5 billion and spend almost none of it is hard for a pragmatist to comprehend. But that is the judgment call that came down from North Carolina’s reigning political boss, Senator Phil Berger, with dutiful assent from his sidekicks in the state House. Our state has seen its public structures wither over 10 years of austerity policy. Looking at this sad landscape, Republicans decided they would prefer TABOR.

What is TABOR? The so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights is a longtime conservative pet rock that would restrict spending growth to inflation and the growth in a state’s population, making no allowance for the rapid growth of education and healthcare costs and legally prohibiting a change in the state’s priorities. It is a vision so stringent that only Colorado has adopted it–and there, it has been a disaster. Nonetheless, Senator Berger chose TABOR as his spending target and bounded further down the road toward “starving the beast.”

This crusade against Republicans’ bete noirs has been raging for a decade. As Rob Schofield observed, state spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen to 30% below the average that prevailed in the decades preceding Republican control. Government, in other words, has shrunk by almost one-third–a truly radical decline. And this diminution has helped to cause a greater erosion of the state’s attributes, ranging from personal income growth to the very survival of rural communities.

Put simply, essentially everything about North Carolina has gotten worse over the last 10 years. The fall from grace of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, alone, was enough to make the 2010s a period of historic decline. Across the state, rural counties lost population. Test scores went down and the achievement gap expanded (not an unwelcome trend in the view of the party of Trump). Yet the gerrrymandered masters of our state are ringing in a new fiscal year with the same ideology and bluster that have sent us Mississippi-bound.

This budget takes as its inspiration the last ten years of ultra-conservative governance–the governance that will make us even more of a laggard in the race to achieve the promise of the twenty-first century. It largely ignores what Governor Cooper has proposed and is barbed with nasty Easter eggs that would take even more power from his office. This is a budget unworthy of a democracy that generations of North Carolinians sacrificed to build. But then North Carolina Republicans view democracy with considerable ambivalence.