Almost two years ago, the new federal legislation that starts to fix our health system, the Affordable Care Act, was passed into law. Health care is such a large and complicated part of our economy that beginning the needed fixes has been almost like watching an oil tanker negotiate a three-point turn in [Continue Reading...]
As I was leaving my office on a recent evening, a coworker told me that one of her young nieces had called and asked why she is in love with her fiancé. She had playfully told her that it was because he builds things and likes what she cooks. It was a pretty [Continue Reading...]
A key challenge in an increasingly diverse state such as North Carolina is ensuring that all citizens have equal and unbiased access to the government that represents them. Regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, or religion, all North Carolinians have an equal right to participate in the democratic process without fear of being excluded [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...]
There are thousands upon thousands of migrant farmworkers in North Carolina throughout the year who maintain and harvest various such as tobacco, sweet potatoes and scores of others. Some of these migrant laborers are in the United States under the H-2A program – a visa program that brings in foreign workers temporarily for [Continue Reading...]
People of different political stripes frequently argue about the best ways to attack child poverty. More carrots? More sticks? Here’s a fact, however, that’s beyond dispute: Research shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the one of the most effective tools at our disposal for lifting children out of poverty. The [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...]
In North Carolina, our constitution promises that exercises of government power will be limited to those “instituted solely for the good of the whole.” This is a solemn moral covenant as well as a legal obligation. Too often, we fail to live up to these ideals. We allow widespread poverty to exist, especially [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...]
One of the bills that became law during the 2011 session of the North Carolina General Assembly is called the “Founding Principles Act.” The new law changes, expands (and presumably, seeks to improve) how the state education system deals with “civic literacy.” It’s too bad state lawmakers didn’t somehow make themselves subject to [Continue Reading...]
Documented wage theft cost North Carolina workers and their communities an estimated $4.7 million in 2011, according to a new report released Monday. The North Carolina Justice Center report finds that when an employer does not pay a worker for the work she or he has performed, families struggle to make ends meet, [Continue Reading...]
The North Carolina General Assembly should reform the state’s economic development incentive policies to ensure the creation of stable, quality jobs for the state’s workers, according to a new report released Thursday by the NC Budget & Tax Center. These reforms are especially critical given North Carolina’s high unemployment rate and the high-profile [Continue Reading...]
