Joseph Coletti

We’ve been generally supportive of the General Assembly’s approach to budgeting, even as we’ve cautioned against overspending and continued to seek reforms in the process. Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene highlight North Carolina in their summary of a useful report from the left-of-center Center for Budget and Policy Priorities on…

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…

“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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…