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)

  • Recession ahead?

    Governing magazine’s Liz Farmer finds economists are increasingly worried about the possibility of a recession. She writes that S&P sees slower growth as a more likely scenario than outright contraction, but budget timelines are not as simple. Agencies have already begun planning their budgets through June 2021—the governor will…
    Joseph Coletti, December 10, 2018

  • Political reporting in state capitals

    “For those who have an appetite for politics and the free time to pursue it, this is a journalistic Golden Age,” Alan Ehrenhalt, senior editor of Governing magazine, writes. “For the ordinary voter who thinks about politics only at election time, it is more like a Dark Age.” Ehrenhalt…
    Joseph Coletti, December 6, 2018

  • Charity is the latest victim of our partisan culture

    Charitable giving is lower in places with competitive politics and giving declines among people when their party is in the minority, NC State professor Richard Clerkin and his co-authors found in a recent paper. Another interesting aspect of the study is its presumption that taxes complement charitable giving,…
    Joseph Coletti, December 3, 2018

  • Why charitable contributions are tax deductible

    One of the currently fashionable complaints about charitable and philanthropic giving of even left-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos is that the money does nothing to help the poor or reduce income inequality. James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley in an essay at Commentary  argue that charitable giving receives a tax…
    Joseph Coletti, November 30, 2018
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  • What if we monitored hurricane relief distribution?

    Before Hurricane Florence hit, Republican legislators had criticized Gov. Roy Cooper for the slow pace of distributing relief funds after 2016’s Hurricane Matthew. Research in India points to the potential for follow-up phone calls to make sure people get the help they have been promised. Just telling randomly selected…
    Joseph Coletti, November 28, 2018

  • Unemployed and overly optimistic

    People who are unemployed start their job search with needed optimism, like new entrepreneurs. Their optimism is generally too high for their situation, particularly when they have been unemployed for a long time, but their lack of success finding a job does little to temper their optimism.  New research…
    Joseph Coletti, November 27, 2018

  • Cyber Monday and the Internet sales tax

    Have you been busy taking advantage of the CyberMonday deals available online today through Wayfair, Overstock, or other online retailers not based in North Carolina? The North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) tried to make shopping more cumbersome for you and those companies. Instead of waiting for direction…
    Joseph Coletti, November 26, 2018

  • When North Carolina made its own money

    University of Delaware Professor Farley Grubb has developed an impressive body of work examining colonial-era money. He and his former student Cory Cutsail have a new working paper in which they reconstruct North Carolina’s history from 1712 to 1774 issuing its own money, and what exactly that money was.
    Joseph Coletti, November 19, 2018