Joseph Coletti

North Carolina and Florida have solid Republican legislative majorities who want voters to ensure tax rates remain low into the future. Florida voters will decide whether to require two-thirds of members in both legislative chambers to pass tax hikes. Liz Farmer, writing for Governing magazine, cites the Mercatus…

Do North Carolina local authorities make clear enough the tax implications of borrowing? State law requires ballot referenda  to include language authorizing payment of bonds and interest and “providing that additional taxes may be levied in an amount sufficient to pay the principal of and interest on the bonds be…

Do managed care organizations do enough to combat Medicaid fraud? The question means more than in the past for North Carolina, which is preparing to rely more on private insurers for Medicaid administration. The US Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General (OIG) found Medicaid managed care organizations…

Baltimore is now the deadliest city in America. With 55.5 homicides per 100,000 people in 2017, it ranked 21st in the world and far outpaced New Orleans and Detroit. USA Today finds that a portion of Charm City’s increase can be attributed to less vigilant policing beginning in 2015,…

Economists Katharine Abraham and Melissa Kearney find that trade- and technology-induced reductions in the demand for labor are the primary reasons fewer young and prime-age adults were working in 2016 than in 1999. Higher minimum wages have made it more expensive to hire somebody. Disability insurance has made work…

You may have heard of the Scared Straight program that sought to use prison visits to keep teens on the right side of the law. It did not. The effort is one of the few programs in the Results First database that had negative social returns on each…

Employer-provided health insurance shields workers from the cost of care and the cost of insurance, distorting the market for health care in two ways. Large premium increases also take money that could have gone to wages. In spite of these harms, most medium-sized and large employers provided insurance to their…

This portrait of the New America Foundation, which had an original and formidable voice from its founding, is not just another story about money and mission in think tanks. Even before its controversy over the EU’s regulation of Google and before its president got caught in cahoots with Hillary…