By John C. Spruill
At the candidate forum here in Washington County, local Democratic Party activist Wesley Stokes told the room during a recent Democratic Party rally in Roper that the average North Carolina household — he defined that as any household making under $200,000 — would get about a hundred-dollar tax cut from the income tax amendment on the November ballot, while households making $250,000 and up would get almost seven thousand dollars. "This isn't the tax cut for you," he said. "This is the tax cut for the rich."
I estimate construction jobs for a living, so I ran the numbers. Here is what I found.
Start with what the amendment does, because it isn't what was described. Senate Bill 1080 doesn't cut anybody's taxes. What it does is lower the ceiling written into the state constitution from 7 percent to 3.5 percent. The ballot question says so plainly: "Constitutional amendment to keep the State income tax rate from being raised higher than three and one-half percent." It's a limit on what future legislatures can do to the rate, and that's the whole measure.
The tax cut Stokes was describing is a different thing entirely. Our income tax rate is 3.99 percent right now and is scheduled to drop to 3.49 percent in 2027 if the state hits its revenue targets. That's already written into law. It happens whether this amendment passes, fails, or never makes the ballot. So every dollar figure quoted that night was attached to the wrong thing. Vote the amendment down and the rate cut still comes.
Now the arithmetic, and I'd ask you to look at the whole bill and not just the refund. When somebody tells you what a tax change hands back, ask what that person was paying in to begin with. One number without the other will mislead you every time.
North Carolina has a flat income tax, so this is easy enough to check yourself. Take your income, subtract your standard deduction, multiply by the rate. The deduction is $25,500 for a married couple filing jointly, $19,125 for head of household filers, and $12,750 for single filers. For a married couple, at 3.99 percent now and 3.49 percent after:
Income $41,813: pays $651 now, $569 after, saves $82 Income $60,000: pays $1,377 now, $1,204 after, saves $172 Income $100,000: pays $2,973 now, $2,600 after, saves $372 Income $200,000: pays $6,963 now, $6,090 after, saves $872 Income $250,000: pays $8,958 now, $7,835 after, saves $1,122 Income $500,000: pays $18,933 now, $16,560 after, saves $2,372 Income $1,400,000: pays $54,843 now, $47,970 after, saves $6,872
Look at that last column, then look at the one before it. Every household on the list gets the same deal: about 12.5 percent off the bill. One-eighth, top to bottom. The man at $1.4 million gets $6,872 back because he's writing a check for $54,843. He pays 84 times the state income tax that a median Washington County couple pays, on 33 times the income. That's not a loophole. It's what a flat tax does. Cut the same percentage for everybody and the dollars come out proportional to what everybody was already paying. Report the refund and leave out the bill, and you've turned plain arithmetic into a scandal.
Which brings me to the two numbers Stokes quoted. Seven thousand dollars doesn't show up on that list until roughly $1.4 million of income, more than five times the $250,000 threshold he named. The family at $250,000 that he said was getting almost seven thousand is instead getting about eleven hundred.
The $7,000 is a real figure. It just belongs to somebody else. Our own state budget office, the Office of State Budget and Management, analyzed the 2027 rate cut back in May and found the top one percent of earners would average more than $8,000. The NC Budget and Tax Center used "over $7,000" for the same group in July. The top one percent in this state starts at about $697,400 in income and averages roughly $1.34 million. Stokes took a percentile and reported it as an income threshold, and the two aren't close.
The hundred dollars is real too. That same state analysis found roughly 38 percent of North Carolina filers would see less than $100, and most households less than $170. Percentiles again, not the "under $200,000" bracket he described.
And here's the number nobody said out loud that night. Median household income in Washington County is $41,813. The state median is $72,388. We're not a $200,000 county. We're a $42,000 county, with nearly one household in five below the poverty line. Run our own median through the same arithmetic and a married couple here making $41,813 pays about $651 in state income tax now and about $569 after — eighty-two dollars a year. Head of household, about $113. Single, about $145.
So the hundred dollars was close to right. It just describes us, not the households at $200,000 he pinned it to. The strongest version of his own point was sitting in that room with him, and he reached for somebody else's bracket instead.
One last thing. There are three amendments on that ballot, and the one that got about a sentence at the forum is House Bill 1089. It would require the General Assembly to limit how much local governments can raise property taxes, though the amendment itself sets no number and leaves the size of that limit to a future legislature. Statewide, property taxes take 3.4 percent of income from the lowest-earning fifth and 1.3 percent from the top one percent. For a county with our tax base, that measure reaches further into daily life here than the income tax cap ever will, and it deserves more than a sentence.
Read the ballot questions. Pull out last year's return and run your own numbers — both of them, what you pay and what changes. Nobody should have to take my word for it, or anybody else's.
So yes, this isn't the tax cut for you. It isn't a tax cut at all, for you or for anybody. It's a tax cap. And standing in front of a room in a $42,000 county, telling folks that somebody down the road is walking off with seven thousand dollars when the number isn't true, is a Robin Hood scare tactic and nothing more. That's out of line. It would be just as out of line coming from anybody else.
John C. Spruill is chairman of the Washington County Commissioners.