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Perdue on the budget ruling, immigrants at community colleges and a stimulus report (audio)

Gov. Bev Perdue spoke to reporters before cutting the ribbon at UNC’s new cancer hospital today. We managed to hit three topics in a few minutes.

• The Court of Appeals issued a ruling today (click here for background) that would limit North Carolina governors’ ability to raid various trust funds in order to balance the state budget.
  
  “Clearly, I was taken aback when I saw the ruling,” Perdue said. Although the ruling applied to an Easley administration case, it would apply pretty directly to ways in which Perdue kept the lights on this spring.
  
  “With the budget crisis we had, obviously, I took every pot of money I could take to pay the bills and balance the budget … I can’t speak to what the retroactiveness of the ruling would be, but I just simply say the constitution requires the governor to balance the budget and I believe the people of North Carolina want the bills paid,” she said.
  
  Perdue says the state will appeal the ruling and that she'd do the same thing again if needed to balance the books.
   
• The North Carolina Board of Community Colleges is due to meet this Thursday and Friday to start rulemaking on the issue of admitting undocumented immigrants into the community college system. Even though the proposed policy would require that they pay out of state tuition and impose other restrictions, the policy is drawing fire from groups that advocate for more restrictions on those here illegally.
  
  Perdue also opposes the move.
  
  “It’s hard for me to understand how the state of North Carolina can educate people when they can’t work legally in the state after they’re educated,” Perdue said.
   
• Perdue was also asked about a recent report from the Civitas institute (click here) that that suggests accepting stimulus funds could cost the state 67,000 jobs rather than spark a recovery as intended. The report is particularly critical of the extension of unemployment benefits.
  
  “If you were sitting around a kitchen table and couldn’t pay your light bill or give your kid a decent dinner because you have no money to pay the bills because you’re unemployed, you’d take whatever you could get and be grateful,” Perdue said. “I’m grateful for those jobs and will deal with the hereafter hereafter.
  
  My own reading of that report is that it may be mixing up correlation and causality. That is, the stimulus funds came at the time unemployment was rising, but that seems to me like saying the Coast Guard cutter coming to pluck you out of the water caused your boat to sink. But I'm not an economist and don't play one on TV.
  
  The study was written by a consulting firm run by Authur Laffer, author of the Laffer Curve, which provides one of the cornerstones of supply-side economics.

Click below to hear the raw feed of Perdue talking about all this.