By Nyamekye Daniel, includes “North Carolina lawmakers have touted their conservative spending policies as a filter from fiscal deficit. Financial watchdog Truth in Accounting (TIA), however, said they made repeated financial decisions that left the state with a $4.6 billion debt burden. … ‘The bottom line is that the majority of states went into the pandemic in poor fiscal health, and they will most likely come out of it even worse,’ TIA founder and CEO Sheila Weinberg said.”