The $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill just enacted by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden gives out $1,400 checks to most Americans. It boosts the child-tax credit, keeps weekly unemployment-insurance checks $300 higher than normal, and throws lots of other (borrowed) money around.
Just before the 2020 elections, the RealClearPolitics.com polling average had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump nationwide by 7.2 percentage points. Biden did end up winning the popular vote, yes, but by 4.5 points. There were even larger gaps between pre-election surveys and vote totals in some battleground states.
In North Carolina politics, few issues are as contentious as education. For years, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the Republican-led General Assembly have locked horns on such issues as funding formulas, teacher pay, and parental choice.
In my role as president of the John William Pope Foundation, I’ve learned that while it’s easy to give money, it’s difficult to give money away well. There’s no shortage of promising ideas turned into well-meaning enterprises by well-meaning people. Alas, many have disappointing results.
Through its own regulations, North Carolina restricts the availability of medical services and, as a result, inflates the cost of those services. Rather than looking for ways to redistribute that inflated cost to taxpayers, state policymakers should try deflating it.
If you think the cost of living is too low, I bear good tidings. The Biden administration and its allies in Congress, regulatory agencies, and state governments across the country are working nonstop to raise the cost of food, shelter, energy, and education. Help is on the way!
Taxing the income, sales, or property of a business is a means of paying for government services associated with that business activity. It pays for police, courts, and other means of protecting property and adjudicating disputes. It pays to train current workers and educate future ones. It helps pay for local streets and other infrastructure.
Due to GOP tax policy over the past decade, in other words, North Carolina’s state sales-tax burden went down, not up, by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Alas, some of this effect was offset by increases in county sales taxes. Who is responsible for those hikes? Democrats, overwhelmingly. Democratic politicians authorized those sales-tax referenda and Democratic voters were most likely to favor them.
“One of the most unhappy series of events in the state’s history began in 1835,” stated a textbook used in elementary schools across North Carolina. “As more and more white people came into their territory the Cherokee Indians had been driven further into the hills, but white settlers looked with greed on all their territory.”
Now that Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress (however narrowly), they will probably approve a new round of federal borrowing to bail out state and local governments with shaky finances. In other words, Washington will punish North Carolina and other prudently governed states by saddling us with the cost of other states’ mistakes.
I have strong opinions — but not about how to perform brain surgery, write a smart-phone app, design a golf course, or produce a hip-hop album. Perhaps you do have a strong view about one of these, but almost certainly not about all four.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our schools have gone in a variety of directions. Some public-school districts that shut down last spring have never reopened for in-person learning to any significant degree. Others have welcomed at least their younger students back to school, as have most charter and private schools.
