NC Policy Watch

It never fails, does it. Good people work hard to build bipartisan support to do the right thing, they actually do the right thing, and then Republican ideologues grand-stand to undermine that fragile common ground. The latest episode of right-wing myopia is examined today by NC Policy Watch.

I, for one, am glad to see Chris Fitzsimon pushing back hard against the "multi-million-dollar opinion manufacturers" who would drag North Carolina back to the stone age. And I hope he'll continue to deliver strong analysis like this:

The Council of State this week approved borrowing money to build mental health hospitals, a cancer center, a new public health lab and other projects in what turned out to be a strictly partisan vote.

The projects passed the General Assembly this summer after long negotiations between House and Senate budget writers, so this week’s approval was not a surprise. It is unusual for the Council of State to stop projects approved by the General Assembly.
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Deputy Treasurer Vince Holloman was on hand at the Council of State meeting and told Council members that the proposed projects would not exceed the Treasurer’s guidelines because all the debt won’t be issued at the same time. Moore’s office told the Associated Press that it will make sure the debt limit is not exceeded.

  

There's an old saying in the world of political journalism: Never start a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. I don't know if that advice still applies in the Internet world, but for better or for worse, it's long past time to start a fight with the Raleigh News and Observer.

Why? Because the paper simply isn't doing its job properly. Along with almost every other property in the main stream media, the N&O has gotten lazy and sloppy in ways that cannot be ignored. In particular, the N&O has been entranced by the self-promotional magic of the John Locke Foundation. So instead of critical analysis and healthy skepticism, the N&O regurgitates JLF talking points and "reports" as though they actually say something worth knowing. And while that's an abomination on its face, the problem is even worse. The N&O swallows JLF content like a ten-year-old eating Sweet Tarts, while largely ignoring counter-balancing voices like the Common Sense Foundation and NC Policy Watch. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Commie-pinko Chris Fitzsimon at NC Policy Watch has a problem with the recent finding that ONE OUT OF EVERY FIVE North Carolina children lives in poverty? There he goes go again ... worrying about a bunch of poor, hungry kids who were dumb enough to be born to no-good welfare moms and crackheads.

Why don't you just get with the program, boy? Over at the Puppetshow, Stagemanager Hood thinks poor kids really like being poor and playing in the streets in a Barbara Bush sort of way. But noooooo, you have to go and bring up a bunch of mean ol' facts:

Never mind that almost one in five children in North Carolina lives in poverty. Politicians love the children, including poor ones, especially when they get to school and have to take standardized tests, but helping their poor families at home is a different matter.

Helping their mothers isn’t very popular either, even though it was one of the promises of the 1996 welfare reform initiative, that single mothers would get help with child care so they could enter the workforce in a low-paying job or go back to school to learn a skill to be able to find work.

As we mark the ten year anniversary of welfare reform, it is time to admit that the promise has been broken, as more than 30,000 children in North Carolina languish on the waiting list for a child care subsidy. Their mothers cannot go back to school or take a low-wage job. They are stuck in poverty because they cannot afford care for their child.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe so. But here are two numbers that are also worth a thousand words:

N&O mentions of John Locke Foundation - 70

N&O mentions of NC Policy Watch - 5

The N&O relies on reports and opinion of the state's leading right wing think tank 14 times more often than it does on reports and opinion from the leading progressive think tank.

Yesterday's Friday Follies at NC Policy Watch put the smackdown on one of the oft-repeated lies of tax reformers here in North Carolina. Take a look, and put these talking points in y our pocket for the next time a free-marketeer starts blabbering about the economic costs of taxes.

The rabid right wing folks over at Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist’s group, will have some explaining to do the next they complain about tax rates in North Carolina.

ATR recently released a report on state tax policy across the nation and among the conclusions drawn from the report by a national conservative group was that “states with high tax burdens continually lose residents and their income to lower tax states.”

Norquist and his misguided disciples in North Carolina constantly claim that North Carolina is a high tax state and that tax rates are hurting economic development. Neither is true and now we have proof of that from their own report. The U. S. Census says that from 1990-2000, North Carolina grew faster than every other Southeastern state, except Georgia. From 1995-2000, it was the fifth fastest growing state in the nation and forecasters predict that growth will continue at even higher levels.

I was just browsing NC Policy Watch's website and came across this study by the NC Budget & Tax Center (PDF). I'll post a few facts and figures below the fold, but the quick summary is that North Carolinians aren't getting any richer while the world around us gets more expensive.

• Half of all NC full time workers in 2000 made less than $24,246. Half of all NC full time workers in 2004 made less than... $24,246.
• What would you do with $2,800? Don't think too hard, because chances are you don't have it to spare. The median household income fell $2,806 between 2000 and 2004. That's a drop from 91.4% of the national average to 88.5%. I guess our $2,800 is off in some other state.
• The percentage of North Carolinians living in poverty rose from 13.2 to 15.1 between 2000 and 2004. 15.1% is about one in every seven people. With about 8 million people living in the state, 15.1% is about 1.2 million people. By comparison, the entire combined population of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point is about 1.3 million people.
• 14.9% of families with children under the age of five years lived in poverty in 2000. In 2004 it was 21.2%. One of every five children under the age of 18 lives in poverty.
• 14.1% of North Carolinians had no health insurance in 2000. By 2004, another 2.4% joined that group.
• The average man in North Carolina earns less than his counterparts in each of the other southeastern states; the average woman fares better than only those in West Virginia and South Carolina.

There is also data suggesting that Raleigh is doing unusually well, with a median household income near $50,000. On the whole, however, North Carolinians are worse off than they were in 2000, and "the data suggest that recent trends are not temporary ones caused by the last recession." What does all this mean? I'm no economist, but it seems to me that in times like these, we desperately need a government that is tuned in to the concerns of the working class. The rich, I'm sure, will take care of themselves.