The following is a guest column by Rep. Jimmy Dixon, House District 4, representing Duplin and Onslow counties.
Gov. Cooper has been on several farms in Eastern North Carolina over the last few months attempting to show concern for the plight of our farmers as a result of the recent hurricanes.
He goes around saying that there is more for government to do to help our farmers. The $240 million of your hard-earned money that the General Assembly appropriated is the largest disaster amount ever appropriated to individual farmers in the history of our state.
That is a substantial amount of financial assistance that will help more than 7,000 individual farmers recover a portion of their losses from Matthew and Florence.
But like all tax-and-spend liberals, he wants to raise your taxes and spend more of your money. The fact is that he and other liberals had very little to do with the ability of the General Assembly to provide this relief.
To the contrary, he and many other liberal pundits aggressively criticized the majority for passing the fiscally responsible budgets that have now enabled them to appropriate, from the rainy day fund, some of your money — which they saved — to be used in this time of serious need; and they did it without raising taxes!
Go back and read the liberal news reports. Gov. Cooper and other tax-and-spend progressive liberals said the majority was irresponsible for building our rainy day fund to $1.8 billon instead of spending that money on other things they wanted.
The majority in the General Assembly was not enticed by his irresponsible spending request, and they overrode his budget vetoes.
Aren’t you glad they were not foolish enough to spend all the money they had collected from you? Aren’t you glad they could dip into the reserves and provide a total of about $700 million for disaster relief?
The farming community and all of us need to thank the majority in the General Assembly for their efforts to build up our reserve funds.
Also, much credit is due to the folks at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, the North Carolina Extension Service and the Farm Service Agency. These folks who gathered the data and made the recommendations in record time are to be commended.
The North Carolina Farm Bureau and 100 percent of the legislators in both the House and Senate who supported helping our hard-working farm families are to be commended.
While the governor is having his photo taken on our farms, we know who really “stands up for farmers.”
Sadly, on occasions when it really counts, it is not the governor!
Where was he when the greedy lawyers from Texas started suing our dedicated livestock farmers? Oh, why of course, he was in his mansion hideaway vetoing the Farm Act that was designed to help save our farmers!
How many livestock farms has he visited for a photo? Does he know that livestock accounts for 67 percent of our farm gate sales revenue?
If he does, then we are left to conclude that he doesn’t care.
What is obvious is that he is in full campaign mode which started, interestingly enough, in New York City during the same week that their legislature celebrated and applauded the passage of a law which allows an abortion even after the birthing process has started — which is at that point the murder of an innocent child!
Gov. Cooper has a wonderful family and a noble rural heritage, but he continues to turn his back on our economically vital livestock farmers.
We, the people, should arm ourselves with facts and good memories when we go into the voting booths in the future.