Spending

Leadership matters, and the chart below shows it in crystal clear terms. In North Carolina, we’re fortunate to have legislative leaders who take spending, taxing, and budgeting very seriously. Their prudent decisions over the past decade have given our state national attention and made us the model for other…

Jay Greene’s analysis of a new Journal of Public Economics study of spending and student performance is a must-read.  Professor Greene writes, Some researchers and journalists have become very excited about a new set of studies that claim to find a causal relationship between increasing school spending and improving student outcomes. …

The U.S. financial commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan is behemoth — more than what was spent post World War II on rebuilding Europe. Unfortunately, huge amounts have been wasted, spent on dubious projects with little accountability, as Reason reports. One such project is a compressed natural gas station. Price tag:…

Expand government and you’ll grow the economy? Dr. Roy Cordato examines the flaws in this view an concludes: The point here is that, while public sector spending adds to GDP in official government statistics, it can only increase spending at the expense of the private sector because of the…

North Carolina hasn’t seen a state-wide bond referendum since the early 2000s, but that doesn’t mean the local governments haven’t had a bond on the ballot.  This year there are a number of bond items on the ballot including water systems, parks and recreation, schools, sidewalks, and many more.  Some for…

Everything has a price, so how much do Americans spend on the spookiest day of the year? Since 2005, the National Retail Federation has conducted a Halloween Consumer Spending Survey to gauge consumer behavior and shopping trends related to Halloween spending. Overall, 162 million…

Governor Bev Perdue’s new push for an increase to the sales tax has come packaged with two misleading assertions (to put it gently). Terry Stoops, JLF’s education specialist, already did an excellent job explaining that the purported 49th placing for per-pupil education funding lacks solid basis.

In 1993, Canada's federal debt was equal to 67 percent of the nation's annual economic output, and in 1995 the Wall Street Journal called it an honorary member of the third world. How times have changed. By 2009, that level of debt had fallen to 29 percent of economic output, and Canada's debt appears to be far more manageable than that of the United States. So how did they do it?