Joseph Coletti

Senior Fellow, Fiscal Studies
Joe Coletti is a senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation focused on fiscal policy issues. He previously headed the North Carolina Government Efficiency and Reform initiative within the Office of State Budget and Management, which led to changes automotive fleet management, natural and cultural resources, and state contracting. He has spent his career improving operations and strategies at for-profit, nonprofit, and government entities. He has degrees from Johns Hopkins SAIS and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Posts by Joseph Coletti (page 1)

  • Covid-19 bill in Congress still awful, unnecessary and potentially counterproductive

    Moderate Democrats in the Senate are the last line of defense for fiscal sanity and against the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 disaster exacerbation bill. With the economy strengthening, vaccines promised for all adults by the end of May, and schools and states reopening, the need for the bill weakens and concerns…
    Joseph Coletti, March 5, 2021
    Foreboding Capitol

  • Targeting states to expand Medicaid

    The COVID bribe would increase the federal match for non-expansion recipients by 5% the next two years in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, plus Missouri and Oklahoma. That’s not taking the 90%FMAP for the roughly 500,000-person expansion population to 95%, but taking the pandemic-enhanced 73.85% to 78.85% (67.75% and 72.75%…
    Joseph Coletti, February 26, 2021
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  • Covid bailout of states unnecessary and harmful

    We have documented North Carolina’s strong financial condition and have argued against new federal money for months, even as we sought more rational rules on how that first round of federal money to states could be used. As we have talked with fiscal experts in other…
    Joseph Coletti, February 25, 2021
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  • January General Fund Update

    State revenues continued to outperform last year’s collections in January while appropriations fell, adding over $1 billion to the unreserved fund balance, according to the latest monthly report from the Office of the State Controller. Despite the good news, it is not clear why appropriations fell or what any…
    Joseph Coletti, February 16, 2021
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  • North Carolina is the gold standard for pro-growth tax reform

    North Carolina’s record of spending restraint and tax reform over the past decade continues to inspire other states and demonstrate what is possible. John Hendrickson and Jonathan Williams, writing in the Des Moines Register, urge Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds to follow our example of sustainable spending and taxes. North…
    Joseph Coletti, February 16, 2021
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  • Consensus revenue forecast

    General Fund revenue from state taxes should reach $27.6 billion by the end of June, which would be 16% higher than in FY2019-20, according to the consensus revenue forecast from the governor’s Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) and the General Assembly’s Fiscal Research Division. That could give…
    Joseph Coletti, February 12, 2021
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  • December Covid Misery Index

    This is our third iteration of the Covid Misery Index, with previous looks in October and November. The path of jobs recovery and lives lost continues to defy simple narratives of red states vs blue states, lockdowns vs opening, or even speculation based on tourism. Massachusetts, New Jersey,…
    Joseph Coletti, February 8, 2021
    Business office or store shop is closed/bankrupt business due to the effect of novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Unidentified person wearing mask hanging closed sign in background on front door.

  • Minimum wage increases hurt the poor

    Two new studies confirm that a higher minimum wage would not be an unalloyed gain for low-wage workers. For their study, David Neumark and Peter Shirley “assembled the entire set of published studies in this literature and identified the core estimates that support the conclusions from each study, in most…
    Joseph Coletti, January 28, 2021
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