Joseph Coletti

Senior Fellow
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)

  • Amazon incentives in perspective

    Amazon’s recent announcement of a distribution center in Garner is one of thirteen so far this year, with more likely to be announced in the coming weeks and months ahead, joining locations in Alabama, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Washington. Incentive offers have differed from place to place, which suggests the…
    Joseph Coletti, August 17, 2018

  • Volunteers help where governments can’t

    More than 1,200 volunteers across 57 North Carolina counties have been trained to help in case of disasters, search and rescue operations, terrorist attack, or fire. Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programs get volunteers ready to supplement first responders. A Stateline story explains, “It [CERT] launched in response…
    Joseph Coletti, August 15, 2018

  • V.S. Naipaul and “Our Universal Civilization”

    Until a week ago, I had never considered reading V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate for literature. City Journal editor Brian Anderson gave a brief appreciation of Naipaul’s writing in explaining why The Masque of Africa was on his summer reading list. The discussion pointed to Naipaul’s…
    Joseph Coletti, August 14, 2018

  • The morality of work requirements

    “U.S. social policy is built on a foundation of values,” AEI’s Michael Strain writes at Bloomberg.com in getting to the heart of why reforming most government programs creates such heated debate.  Most discussion of work requirements, eligibility, and the costs and benefits of social programs begs the questions of personal…
    Joseph Coletti, August 10, 2018

  • Food program in search of takers

    From the headline to the details, everything about a recent North Carolina Health News story illustrates what is wrong with the way too many government programs try to help. The program in this case is the US Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Program, which is intended to provide…
    Joseph Coletti, August 8, 2018

  • Is capitalism rigged in favor of elites?

    Deirdre McCloskey (no) and Jason Furman (yes) will be debating at economist.com over the next week whether capitalism is rigged. Furman opens with a claim about how powerful interests help write regulations. McCloskey begins with the innovation of the past two hundred years. The debate comes down to the…
    Joseph Coletti, August 7, 2018

  • If this is what people think of capitalism, no wonder they want something else

    Michael Tomasky, editor of the journal Democracy, has advice for those who would like fewer socialists. “Stop creating them.” Tomasky outlines a number of ways that cronies in government and business have helped one another without doing much good for the rest of society. Free market supporters from…
    Joseph Coletti, August 7, 2018

  • How to avoid pension entanglements with ICE

    New York’s state comptroller divested that state’s pension funds from two private prison companies that operate immigration detention centers. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System faced pressure from “hundreds of educators” among its 933,410 members to do the same, but has opted to keep its investment and “to communicate with…
    Joseph Coletti, August 6, 2018