Republicans could’ve prepared North Carolina for a recession. They failed.

Republican leaders closed the General Assembly’s short session last week praising themselves for setting aside reserve funds to prepare for what Senate leader Phil Berger called the “near certainty” of a recession.

As usual, Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore brought up the canard that free-spending Democrats who controlled the legislature in 2008 had not set aside enough money for when, as Berger put it, “the economy slows down.” The recession that started in late 2007 and ran through 2009 wasn’t a slowdown. It was the Great Recession, the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Nationwide, state tax revenue fell by $87 billion from October 2008 through September 2009. No state was or could be prepared for losses on that scale. The state’s current $4.5 billion rainy day fund would help, but it would be quickly wiped out, presuming Republican lawmakers would spend it to help people in distress.

If a recession indeed comes again, the best preparation for hard times would be to suspend tax cuts scheduled for this year, increase access to federal aid by expanding Medicaid and shore up the state’s worst-in-the-nation unemployment insurance program. Berger and Moore, despite hailing themselves as so much more prudent than the feckless Democrats, took none of those steps in the session that ended earlier this month.

Personal and corporate income tax cuts approved in 2021 will continue as scheduled. The reductions will cost the state $1.5 billion in revenue in 2023.

A bill proposed by state Sen. Wiley Nickel (D-Wake) that would have increased the minimum payment and duration of unemployment insurance benefits went nowhere, despite being sweetened for Republicans by the inclusion of an 18-month suspension of the underemployment tax paid by employers. The tax holiday would have tapped the unemployment program’s bloated $3.4 billion reserve fund – the nation’s second largest – to save employers $900 million.

But the Republican leaders’ most egregious failure to prepare for hard times was their inability to agree on expanding Medicaid. Berger had staunchly opposed expansion for more than a decade. That refusal has cost North Carolina tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tens of thousands of new jobs.

Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue, Wake County Democrat, said of Medicaid expansion, “The only effects for the state would be positive benefits.”

North Carolina has held out against Medicaid expansion even as 38 other states have recognized the financial and humane benefits of giving mostly working poor people access to health care. North Carolina even held out as the worst pandemic in a century hit the state, causing the deaths of more than 25,000 people.

In May, Berger suddenly acknowledged that Medicaid expansion makes sense, but he yoked it to regulatory changes opposed by most of the state’s hospital systems. That prompted House Republicans to offer a separate expansion bill that called for more study of expansion’s effects, as if the experience of dozens of other states isn’t verdict enough.

Each chamber passed its own bill, but the short session ended without Medicaid expansion. Thousands of ill North Carolinians will have to wait longer for access to the health care they need. The state is again forgoing billions of dollars in federal aid.

Failure to prepare wasn’t the Republicans’ only lapse. They couldn’t pass a bill legalizing medical marijuana, a popular idea that there’s no sound reason to oppose. They didn’t provide the support for public schools as called for by the Leandro ruling, despite having a projected $6.5 billion budget surplus. They failed to build up the state’s public health system, despite weaknesses revealed by the pandemic. Finally, they approved only modest raises that won’t stem the losses of teachers, school support personnel and state employees.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper can see the work that wasn’t done. On tax cuts and unemployment insurance, there’s not much he can do. But he could press the issue on Medicaid expansion by calling a special session focused just on just that. The votes are there to approve it now before extra federal incentives lapse, thousands more people with medical needs are neglected and a recession arrives.