As most everyone who knows the North Carolina legislature will tell you, regardless of their political allegiances, the coffee there is terrible. A cup of the bitter and watery stuff is more apt to produce irritability than alertness, a fact that becomes increasingly evident as a legislative session drags on. Inadequate caffeine may be behind some of the head-scratching policy coming out of Raleigh in the last few years...

This time last year, the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress were racing to stretch ribbon and wrapping paper around a $2 trillion gift to big corporations and rich investment bankers, the optimistically named Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. With a years’ worth of evidence now in, two things are indisputably clear.

We’re living through the worst “good” economy in generations, a reality that many of the rich and powerful people who have rigged the system are desperately hoping the rest of us won’t notice. The last time rich people managed to siphon off this much of the treasure that our economy generates...

History has a habit of turning the tables on us. Economic strengths can become liabilities, and forces that once harmed communities can become necessary to those same communities’ economic survival.

Big corporations and wealthy executives have been on quite a run. Corporate profits are at historic levels, stock prices are through the roof, and plush executive pay has become the norm. At the same time, corporate taxes have been slashed both here in North Carolina starting in 2013 and last December at the federal level.

When President Trump decided last September to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, he claimed to want a permanent legislative replacement, and set a March 5th deadline, in theory, to push Congress to act. Thus far, the Administration has failed to deliver and young adults and their families in North Carolina are paying the price.

The ten years since the start of the Great Recession have done little to address the fundamental economic problems facing North Carolina. The worst of the recession may have passed, but many barriers to economic opportunity and security remain. This report documents the persistence of long-standing economic inequalities (particularly along racial lines), a deepening divide between wealthy investors and everyone else, a lack of robust job growth overall, and the continued concentration of economic opportunity in a few metropolitan areas. None of these pathologies are natural, but rather the lack of adequate policy response, and their continued existence demands real solutions.

In the dog days of summer in 2003, people in Kannapolis and neighboring towns northeast of Charlotte got news that more than four thousand people working for Pillowtex were losing their jobs. Several hundred more in Concord got the same news, along with other communities outside of North Carolina.

Does it feel like your paycheck never goes as far as it used to?

Do you scratch your head when leaders in Raleigh talk about how great our economy is doing?

In a yearly ritual as reliable as weird weather and parents stressing about finding summer camp for the kids, late spring finds some legislative leaders in Raleigh flogging another round of tax cuts, all the while claiming that past rounds of tax reductions have magically “fixed” North Carolina’s economy.