The free market, unless we need government’s help

The North Carolina Home Builders Association can be counted on to fight virtually every proposed regulation that would protect the environment or encourage more sensible growth and development. It is all part of their free-market philosophy that wants as small a government as possible.

The same free marketers this week publicly asked for government help. The association is part of the National Home Builders push for a federal bailout package of at least $100 million to help their industry. That would be the government they complain about every day.

More evidence the Right is wrong on taxes

The folks on the Right continue to tell us that North Carolina taxes are too high and are hurting economic development and the quality of life in the state. Those claims will only increase as the budget debate begins in the General Assembly and the saner minds realize that they must raise new revenue to address the looming $3 billion budget hole.

Balancing the budget with cuts alone will devastate human service programs that are already underfunded and unable to help many families who are struggling. North Carolina taxes and spending are not out of line with other states and government spending per capita has stayed roughly the same in the last 8 years.

That is part of the empirical evidence that the Right is wrong. The latest migration study from United Van Lines provides real life evidence. Only Nevada and the District of Columbia attracted more residents from other places in the country than North Carolina last year.

People are still moving to North Carolina in droves. Hard to imagine that happening if the state tax system was as oppressive as the anti-government crowd wants you to believe.

Telling numbers

Governor Mike Easley’s confusing 8-year term as governor ends Saturday when Beverly Perdue takes the oath of office. News outlets have all been running their retrospective of Easley’s accomplishments and not-so-wonderful moments.

In less than three weeks, President-elect Obama will be President Obama and the 8-year term of President George W. Bush will be over.  The national news outlets are just beginning their look back at the Bush years.

The latest issue of Harper’s magazine has quite a bit of information to help them, including an article by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, “The $10 Trillion Hangover: Paying the Price for Eight years of Bush,”  that includes the following numbers about what has happened to people in North Carolina and the nation since Bush took office in 2001.

Cost of a family insurance premium before Bush: $6,772. Cost after Bush: $12,680.
That’s an 87 percent increase.

People without health insurance before Bush: 38.4 million. Number after Bush: 45.7 million.
That’s a 19 percent increase.

Families in poverty before Bush: 6.4 million. After Bush: 7.6 million.
That’s also a 19 percent increase.

Real median household income before Bush: $50,557. After Bush: $50,233.
That is a decrease of one percent.

Corporate profits before Bush: $980 billion. After Bush: $1.642 billion.
That’s a 68 percent increase.

Talk about the need for a change.

The move to the scary fringe

Maybe it’s because they still can’t come to grips with the fact that Barack Obama was elected and even carried North Carolina, but the folks on the right have taken some of their already extreme rhetoric to new lows lately.

The best example is Jeff Taylor, the Charlotte staffer for Raleigh’s most well known think tank. Taylor wasn’t exactly polite in 2008, at one point calling Mike Easley a liar and a fascist for example, but he has taken his offensive hysteria to new limits in the new year.

Last week Taylor responded to the news that Robert Guy was leaving his job as head of the state’s troubled probation system in post on the organization’s blog titled “Go to hell Robert Guy.”  

The first lines of the post were “You know you deserve it, and so does your wife. Die you worthless bastard.”

Lovely. And this is not some anonymous, untraceable blogger in the hinterlands wishing public officials dead, it is an employee of a think tank in Raleigh that claims to be a credible source of information in the state policy debate.

Blogs may be different in tone and style than policy analyses, but you would think there would be some line of decency that allegedly credible organizations wouldn’t cross. Wherever you think that line is, wishing a man and his wife dead is clearly past it.