The General Assembly will soon put together their FY2012-13 continuation budget, in which lawmakers make changes to the second year of the biennial state budget that was passed in the spring of 2011. Any changes to the state budget are based on the availability of revenue (whether there is more [Continue Reading...]
As the last federal recovery funds supporting public education in North Carolina run out, a larger share of responsibility for funding public education must shift back to state government, says a new report. In accepting this responsibility, lawmakers must recommit to maintaining and increasing the capacity of North Carolina’s schools to fairly and [Continue Reading...]
Personal income tax is integral to supporting the state’s investment in public schools, public safety agencies, public health programs, and infrastructure development, according to a report released this morning. North Carolina’s personal income tax represents half of the revenue collected by the state each year – $10 billion in 2011 – according to [Continue Reading...]
“When government promotes gambling: A budget solution or state sponsored exploitation?” North Carolina has never been known as a big state for gambling. We adopted a state-run lottery later than most and have been slow to embrace casinos and other forms of legalized games of chance. Video poker remains the subject of a hotly contested [Continue Reading...]
Recent considerations by the NC General Assembly’s House Select Committee on Early Childhood Education Improvement to explore privatizing North Carolina’s Pre-K program could severely limit access to the program in rural, high-poverty areas, a new report cautions. Using county-level data on the location of Pre-K program slots, rural and urban designations of counties, [Continue Reading...]
In recent days, a marketing campaign launched by the Pope Civitas Institute and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation began claiming that last year’s state budget – which cut taxes on the wealthiest while slashing funds for vital public investments – actually increased teacher positions in North Carolina. The following facts from the NC [Continue Reading...]
“When government promotes gambling: A budget solution or state sponsored exploitation?” North Carolina has never been known as a big state for gambling. We adopted a state-run lottery later than most and have been slow to embrace casinos and other forms of legalized games of chance. Video poker remains the subject of a hotly contested [Continue Reading...]
“When government promotes gambling: A budget solution or state sponsored exploitation?” North Carolina has never been known as a big state for gambling. We adopted a state-run lottery later than most and have been slow to embrace casinos and other forms of legalized games of chance. Video poker remains the subject of a hotly contested [Continue Reading...]
North Carolina’s public structures and systems – such as its public schools, courts, and parks – have been badly damaged by the Great Recession, high unemployment, and an outdated revenue system, according to a new report released Thursday morning. Without a strategy to improve revenue collections, the state’s public investments in [Continue Reading...]
North Carolina’s rural communities are far more susceptible to the impact of state and federal budget decisions, according to a new report released Friday morning. Rural counties are significantly less well-positioned their urban counterparts to fund core governmental operations, according to a report by the Budget & Tax Center – a [Continue Reading...]
The coming political year: What will happen? What should happen? It looks like 2012 is going to be one heck of a year in North Carolina politics and public policy — maybe one for the ages. Between Governor Perdue’s decision not to seek a second term, the General Assembly’s “midnight madness” fiasco, a statewide vote [Continue Reading...]
The state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is available to low and moderate-income workers and is equal to 5 percent of the federal EITC. It is designed to encourage and reward work as well as offset the substantial state and local tax contributions of these workers. At a critical time for working families and the [Continue Reading...]
The North Carolina Budget & Tax Center, a project of the NC Justice Center, released a new report Wednesday detailing how 10 counties were “persistently poor” in 2000, meaning that they had high poverty rates every year for three decades. Persistent poverty is defined by both the percentage of people living in poverty [Continue Reading...]
The coming political year: What will happen? What should happen? It looks like 2012 is going to be one heck of a year in North Carolina politics and public policy — maybe one for the ages. Between the General Assembly’s “midnight madness” fiasco, other special legislative sessions, a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment to [Continue Reading...]
The coming political year: What will happen? What should happen? It looks like 2012 is going to be one heck of a year in North Carolina politics and public policy — maybe one for the ages. Between the General Assembly’s “midnight madness” fiasco, other special legislative sessions, a statewide vote on a constitutional amendment to [Continue Reading...]
