Cities escape budget blues by slipping their bounds.

• Position: Annexation of Myrtle Beach

Finally a remedy for the state's fiscal ills: annex Myrtle Beach.

North Carolina has pretty much kept its hands to itself since ceding its western lands (now Tennessee) in 1789. But liberal annexation laws have helped put Tar Heel cities in good financial shape. That, at least, is what one scholar thinks.

Helen Ladd, a professor of public-policy studies at Duke University, and her Syracuse University colleague John Yinger studied the state of the nation's cities from 1972 to 1988. Their results were published in a 1989 book, America's Ailing Cities, recently revised and released in paperback.

Ladd and Yinger rated 71 U.S. cities on their potential to provide adequate services at reasonable tax rates. Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem and Charlotte all rank in the upper fifth. (Raleigh wasn't included because only cities with a population of more than 300,000 or that are part of one of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, such as the three in the Triad, were considered.)

Ladd found that after losing ground in the 1970s, most cities were in better shape after the 80s economic boom. That was especially true in North Carolina. Greensboro, for instance, moved from ninth in 1982 to fourth in '88. High Point rose from 15th to sixth; Winston-Salem, from 14th to 12th; and Charlotte, from...