AAC Blog
By Cynthia Tucker, AJC
8:35 am August 12, 2010
The deficit is a serious matter, as Congressional Republicans — new converts to so-called fiscal conservatism — are fond of pointing out. By 2020, when entitlement spending has ballooned with the retirement of the baby boomers, the red ink threatens to drown the nation’s economy. (That’s if Social Security and Medicare are not reined in.)
But the GOP is also caught up in a widespread case of mass insanity about simple arithmetic, arguing that tax cuts pay for themselves and don’t increase the deficit. The budget experts on Capitol Hill beg to disagree. From the WaPo:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year — and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation’s millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.
New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
The analysis, requested by Democrats on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, comes as debate heats up over tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, most of which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. Republicans want to extend all the cuts, which would cost the Treasury Department $238 billion in 2011, according to the taxation committee. President Obama and congressional Democrats have vowed to extend the cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and individuals making less than $200,000 — 98 percent of American taxpayers — in a plan that would add about $202 billion to next year’s deficit.
Given the soaring national debt, many economists deem both proposals unaffordable. Even some Republicans, including Reagan administration budget chief David Stockman and former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, have urged lawmakers to let them expire and allow income tax rates to pop back up to their levels during the Clinton administration.
It’s pretty clear to anyone who didn’t flunk 4th grade arithmetic that shrinking the deficit will require a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases. As I’ve written before, it’s no different from your budget at home. If you lost your job and you find yourself drowning in debt, you need to do two things: cut spending (no summer vacation) and increase revenues (find a job).
David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is working on a book about the financial crisis.
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.
The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.
It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.
It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman’s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.
In fact, since chronic current-account deficits result from a nation spending more than it earns, stringent domestic belt-tightening is the only cure. When the dollar was tied to fixed exchange rates, politicians were willing to administer the needed castor oil, because the alternative was to make up for the trade shortfall by paying out reserves, and this would cause immediate economic pain — from high interest rates, for example. But now there is no discipline, only global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve.
The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.
In 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts, matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.
Soon, the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.
Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.
By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy.
The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.
But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.
The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million. The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in nonfarm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes.
It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.
The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.—
<>*A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page WK9 of the New York edition.
State legislators are beginning to challenge one of the ironclad tenets of public pension policy: that states cannot legally reduce pension benefits for current and future retirees.
Lawmakers in Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota voted earlier this year to limit cost-of-living increases they previously had promised to thousands of current and future retirees, who courts historically have protected from benefit reductions. Not surprisingly, retirees in each state have filed lawsuits asking judges to restore their annual benefit increases to what they were previously.
Lawmakers, state retirement systems, public employee unions and others in the pension policy arena are closely watching the outcome of the legal challenges. If the courts do not reinstate the retirees’ benefits, a flood of states could follow the lead of Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota. The reverse also would be true. “If the plaintiffs are successful, it may discourage legislators in other states from attempting to diminish benefits,” says Keith Brainard, research director at the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, among other officials, favor scaling back pension benefits already promised to current employees and retirees. And a lively debate on the issue is underway in Illinois, where lawmakers reduced the cost-of-living adjustment for newly hired workers. Interest is keen everywhere: Lawmakers from around the country packed a session on modifying public pension benefits at the recent annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Louisville.
Up to now, states trying to trim the rising cost of worker retirement benefits have taken the legally safer — and politically easier — approach of targeting benefit cuts at newly hired employees. Steps states have taken this year include increasing the amount employees contribute toward their own pensions, raising the retirement age and adjusting the formula upon which benefits are based.
But many state lawmakers and pension administrators have concluded that cutting benefits for new employees alone will not save enough money in the short term to keep pension plans solvent over time. So they are searching for ways to zero in on the benefits of current retirees and employees.
Colorado lawmakers, facing projections showing the state’s pension system would run out of money within 30 years, approved a package of benefit reductions that lowered the annual 3.5 percent cost-of-living increase for retirees in 2010 to zero. In future years, the increase will be set at 2 percent, barring another sharp decline in investments. If the changes stand, the average retiree would lose more than $165,000 in benefits over the next 20 years, the retirees say in court papers.
South Dakota reduced the cost-of-living increase from 3.1 percent to 2.1 percent this year; future-year amounts will be tied to how well the system’s investments perform in the market. Minnesota eliminated a 2.5 percent cost-of-living increase and set it at between 1 and 2 percent for its different employee pension funds.
Case law and state constitutions
History is on the employees’ side. State statutes, constitutions and case law consistently define a public pension as a contract between the state and its employees that cannot be impaired. For example, Alaska’s state constitution makes it clear that “membership in employee retirement systems of the state or its political subdivisions shall constitute a contractual relationship. Accrued benefits of these systems may not be diminished or impaired.” Eight other states protect workers in their constitutions. They are Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Mexico, New York and Texas.
In states without constitutional guarantees — Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota fall into this category — statutes and court cases consider retirement benefits an unbreakable contract between the state and workers. That same protection is in the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says: “No state shall … pass any … law impairing the obligations of contracts.”
Courts have determined that cost-of-living increases, which keep pension income on pace with inflation, are part of a worker’s benefits that cannot be diminished. (Generally, increasing benefits faces no legal hurdles.) The principle of safeguarding the purchasing power of pension income through a cost-of-living adjustment is well established. Social Security, the federal government’s retirement program, instituted automatic annual cost-of-living increases in 1975. The amount of the increase has averaged about 3.3 percent a year, although for the first time in 2010, there was no increase because the consumer price index did not rise.
The Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota lawmakers are hoping that the courts will agree that the current financial turmoil facing states imperils public pension systems as never before and calls for a new approach. If legislatures are not permitted to cut retirement costs now, the argument goes, the ability of the public pension systems to pay future benefits will be jeopardized.
“If we don’t reduce these automatic pension increases, the entire fund is poised to go bankrupt,” Republican Josh Penry, minority leader of the Colorado state Senate, told the Denver Post. “Think United [Airlines]. Think GM. That didn’t work out well for the company or the retirees.”
Attorneys for the states say in court filings that limiting cost-of-living increases was justified, and actuarily necessary. “There can be no dispute that preserving the solvency of PERA [The Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association] is a legitimate governmental interest,” Colorado officials argue. Minnesota’s pension legislation “was reasonable and necessary to maintain and restore the financial stability of Minnesota’s public pension plans,” say the state’s pleadings.
Managing market swings
Although Colorado lawmakers and state pension officials blame much of the retirement fund’s current financial troubles on investment losses suffered during the 2007-09 recession — the median decline for funds nationally was 25 percent in 2008 — the truth is that Colorado lawmakers failed to make their annually required contributions to state pension funds in good times and bad. They also boosted retiree benefits without considering future costs.
Colorado’s pension fund was fully funded in 2000. Eight years later, before the recession hit, Colorado fell to 70-percent funded and was heading down further, according to a report released in February by the Pew Center on the States, which publishes Stateline. Most pension specialists recommend a funding level of 80 percent or higher.
Minnesota lawmakers also slid on their pension fund payments. Their pension system’s funding level dropped from 101 percent in 1999 to 81 percent in 2008.
“The Legislature was cutting off funds and starving the pension system,” says Stephen Pincus, a Pittsburgh attorney representing the retirees in all three states. “They shouldn’t now be able to cry there’s no money in the pension system. They had a large hand in creating the crisis.”
South Dakota offers a twist. The state Legislature has been one of the best in the nation at financing its public employee pension system over the years; it was 97-percent funded in 2000 and 2008, according to the Pew report. Lawmakers even increased benefits two years ago. The state retirement system investments did lose more than 20 percent in value in 2008, but gained as much in fiscal 2010.
Pincus says that makes South Dakota’s targeting of current employees and retirees suspect. “There’s no crisis in South Dakota,” he says. “They had one bad year. So they’re going to shore up their pension fund by cutting benefits to those who already receive them?”
Rob Wylie, executive director of the South Dakota retirement system, counters that when the funding level fell to 76 percent after the 2008 losses, it triggered for the first time a state law requiring the pension system to take immediate steps to return the funding level to 100 percent. Savings gained from reducing benefits for newly hired employees would have taken too many years for the system to catch up, Wylie says. So after consulting with retirees the pension board chose to ask lawmakers to trim the cost-of-living increase.
“We could have reversed the increase in the funding formula we approved in 2008,” says Wylie. “But the retiree groups said can you find another way to slow the growth in costs without decreasing the formula? So we did.”
Asked why states are taking the risky strategy of aiming at current retirees, Robert Klausner, a Florida attorney who specializes in public pension law, says many state officials believe they have less to lose in the courtroom by challenging pension protections than taking no action at all. “The belief is that if the employer [the state] prevails, it will have been worth the political risk,” Klausner says. “And if they lose, they will be no worse off than before.” Klausner adds that legislatures are taking the politically-difficult step and letting the courts be the “bad guy” if they overturn the law. Retired judges are among the plaintiffs in Colorado and South Dakota.
The first case to be heard is the one in Minnesota, where a September 15 hearing is scheduled on a motion for summary judgment that will be filed by the state. Colorado’s Supreme Court already has sided once with retirees, saying in a 1961 ruling, “Whether it be in the field of sports or in the halls of the legislature it is not consonant with American traditions of fairness and justice to change the ground rules in the middle of the game.”
Meredith Williams, executive director of the Colorado retirement system, says he is confident the state can prove that the system’s current and future financial stress will compel the court to allow the cost-of-living rollback. “PERA has been upfront about the challenges we face,” he says.—
See related stories:
Pension overhaul treats lawmakers, other state workers differently (7/29/2010)
In graying West Virginia, a mountain of retiree health bills (7/13/2010)
In some states, pension pain yields budget gains (5/20/2010)
In New Hampshire, a new way on retiree health costs (5/12/2010)
Vermont’s pension experiment (3/25/2010)
States tackling public employee retirement benefits in 2010 (2/19/2010)
—Contact Stephen C. Fehr at sfehr@pewtrusts.org.
Stateline Staff Writer John Gramlich contributed reporting to this piece.
Wilmington - North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr and Democratic challenger Elaine Marshall quickly diverged from each other Saturday on how the government should handle the nation's economy and debt.
In a joint appearance coming just days after Marshall won her party's nomination, Burr repeatedly highlighted the nation's $13 trillion debt that's expected to continue growing. He warned that the United States could soon be compared to countries like Greece that are buckling under the weight of their obligations.
"The answer is: Let's stop spending," Burr said. He acknowledged after the event that Republicans have been part of the problem. He voted several times for Bush administration budgets that drastically increased the debt.
Marshall, however, said cuts alone wouldn't save the country's economy.
"We've got to make appropriate investments - the same thing you would do to make your business more profitable," Marshall said. "You can't cut your way into huge profitability."
Greensboro News & Record
The most telling exchange of the debate, I thought, came on a question about the federal deficit and whether Congress should be reining in spending or helping the states.
Marshall: "Right now is not the time to be cutting back,” Marshall said, adding that lax federal regulation had caused some of the states’ budget problems, so it was right that the states should chip in. She used the occasion to attack Burr for voting against the extension of unemployment insurance, citing examples of teachers and police officers going on unemployment. (My inner political consultant says: Classic Democratic position, bonus points for talking about public-sector employees people might care if they get laid off, bonus points for slagging opponent with a fact-based criticism.)
Burr: “I voted three times to pay for unemployment insurance,” he said, re-characterizing his vote as one that didn’t necessarily block the program but merely wanted to see it paid for as we go. “We're $13.3 trillion in debt -- the answer is to stop spending." Burr also quantified the debt per each American child under 18 years old at somewhere north of $100,000. (My inner political consultant says: Burr gets credit for some verbal judo, saying that he’s not against a bill that he voted against and not totally tripping the BS meter. The idea for paying for stuff we need as we go sounds good. And talking about our kids’ future debt load gives an emotional counter to Marshall’s teachers and cops thing.)
Bottom line: Throughout the debate, Marshall looked the most fired up of the three. She really had to convince the Democratic base she has a shot at unseating Burr, and it would seem to me she might have given supporters something to smile about. Burr brought some gravitas to his appearance although didn’t look all that energetic. He was able to counter the “Republicans as obstructionists” storyline Marshall was selling. Beitler might have earned a look from some of the Tea Party folks who were never going to vote for Marshall and were dissatisfied with Burr.
The Independent
By Bob Geary
I just watched a TV re-run of yesterday's U.S. Senate debate at the N.C. Bar Association meeting in Wilmington. In true, objective news reporting style, the N&O's headline — "Burr, Marshall rip Washington" — gave no indication whatsoever that one candidate might've dominated or that the other could've stayed home for all he said. (Oops. Did I just give my punchline away?) The newspaper's article, too, quite judiciously avoided any conclusions as to the Burr-Marshall outcome, and in fact gave more than equal time to the observations of the third candidate on stage, Libertarian Mike Beitler, who maintained — incorrectly — that the choice of Burr or Marshall was no choice at all.
So who won? Elaine Marshall did, convincingly, and I have to believe that even Richard Burr's staffers told him afterward that he can't get through an entire Senate campaign saying absolutely nothing about every issue.
Charlotte Observer
News Briefing for June 23, 2010 – June 29, 2010
By Jim Morrill
WILMINGTON North Carolina's three U.S. Senate candidates agreed on one thing Saturday - Washington is broken.
But in their first debate, Republican incumbent Richard Burr, Democrat Elaine Marshall and Libertarian Michael Beitler clashed over who to blame and how to fix it.
The hour-long debate before the N.C. Bar Association highlighted sharp differences over federal spending and regulations in a race that analysts say will have national implications.
"This Senate race is important for not only how it unfolds, but it's going to help set the table for the presidential race in 2012," said CNN political analyst David Gergen, a Durham native who also spoke to the bar.
In a year when voters across the country are frustrated with government, Burr set the tone early.
"Washington has to change," said the 16-year veteran of the House and Senate. Congress, he added, "is not held in high regard .... We don't deserve to be."
Marshall, North Carolina's Secretary of State, said she could help fix that.
"(Americans) see one side saying 'no' and the other side running scared," she said. "If we keep sending back the same people who got us into this mess, we're not going to change anything."
By Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.
How long is four score and seven years? Just what are unalienable rights? This translation makes important historical documents meaningful. Each book translates the work of a primary source into a language you can understand. Abraham Lincoln
The Gettysburg Address
Picturefrom the battlefield
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
GENESIS OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS. The theme of the Gettysburg Address was not entirely new. President Lincoln was aware of Daniel Webster's statement in 1830 that the origin of our government and the source of its power is "the people's constitution, the people's government; made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Lincoln had read Supreme Court Justice John Marshall's opinion, which states: "The government of the Union . . . is emphatically and truly a government of the people. . . . Its powers are granted by them and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit." In a ringing anti-slavery address in Boston in 1858, Rev. Theodore Parker, the noted minister, defined democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." On a copy of this address in Lincoln's papers, this passage is encircled with pencil marks. But Lincoln did not merely repeat this theme; he transformed it into America's greatest patriotic utterance. With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln gave meaning to the sacrifice of the dead—he gave inspiration to the living.
Rather than accept the address as a few brief notes hastily prepared on the route to Gettysburg (an assumption which has long gained much public acceptance), it should be regarded as a pronouncement of the high purpose dominant in Lincoln's thinking throughout the war. Habitually cautious of words in public address, spoken or written, it is not likely that the President, on such an occasion, failed to give careful thought to the words which he would speak. After receiving the belated invitation on November 2, he yet had ample time to prepare for the occasion, and the well-known correspondent Noah Brooks stated that several days before the dedication Lincoln told him in Washington that his address would be "short, short, short" and that it was "written, but not finished."
Commentary by MAML
All those Republicans such as "W", Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, O"Reilly, DeMint, Burr, Romney and many, many more who have never stood post when their country really needed them and are the first to send our sons and daughters off to war while hiding behind God and the Flag. I would like them to explain what President Lincoln meant when he said, "the people's constitution, the people's government; made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people."
How the votes for Senate went in May:
US SENATE - DEM (Vote For 1) Vote Type Summary Contest Detail Map
100 of 100 Counties Reporting
Percent Votes:
Marcus W. Williams (DEM) 8.46% 35,984
Ann Worthy (DEM) 3.92% 16,655
Elaine Marshall (DEM) 36.35% 154,605
Ken Lewis (DEM) 17.05% 72,510
Susan Harris (DEM) 6.99% 29,738
Cal Cunningham (DEM) 27.24% 115,851
Total 425,343
The National Federation of Democratic Women announced Saturday that Secretary of State and U.S. Senate candidate Elaine Marshall has been selected as the ‘Outstanding Democratic Woman Elected Official’ for 2010.
“I think this award is a little premature—I’d rather it come at the conclusion of my first term in the U.S. Senate!“ said Elaine Marshall. “I’m grateful for this recognition of the work we’ve done. I’m honored to have had the opportunity to serve the people of North Carolina, and I hope to continue to serve this state well.”
The national award is given annually to one female elected official as commendation for exemplary public service. Past winners include Governor Anne Richards of Texas, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, and U.S. Senator Jean Carnahan of Missouri.
