Tag Archives: North Carolina

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What happened to the economy of North Carolina when Republicans cut taxes?

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This story is from The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Four years ago, North Carolina’s unemployment rate was above 10 percent and the state still bore the effects of its battering in the recession. Many rural towns faced jobless rates of more than 20 percent.

But in 2013, a combination of the biggest tax rate reductions in the state’s history and a gutsy but controversial unemployment insurance reform supercharged the state’s economy and has even helped finance budget surpluses.

As Wells Fargo’s Economics Group recently put it: “North Carolina’s economy has shifted into high gear. Hiring has picked up across nearly every industry.”

The tax cut slashed the state’s top personal income tax rate to 5.75 percent, near the regional average, from 7.75 percent, which had been the highest in the South. The corporate tax rate was cut to 5 percent from 6.9 percent. The estate tax was eliminated.

Next came the novel tough-love unemployment insurance reforms. The state became the first in the nation to reject “free” federal payments for extended unemployment benefits and reduce the weeks of benefits to 20 from 26. The maximum weekly dollar amount of payments, $535, which had been among the highest in the nation, was trimmed to a maximum of $350 a week. As a result, tens of thousands of Carolinians left the unemployment rolls.

[…]After a few months, the unemployment rate started to decline rapidly and job growth climbed. Not just a little. Nearly 200,000 jobs have been added since 2013 and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.5 percent from 7.9 percent.

[…]Even with lower rates, tax revenues are up about 6 percent this year according to the state budget office. On May 6, Gov. McCrory announced that the state has a budget surplus of $400 million while many other states are scrambling to fill gaps.

[…]Because North Carolina built in a trigger mechanism that applies excess revenues to corporate rate cuts, the business tax has fallen to 5 percent from 6.9 percent, and next year it drops to 4 percent.

Although North Carolina is too liberal for me, it is nice to see them turning their economy around with tax cuts on job creators, and benefit cuts to those who choose not to work.

At the end of the day, the only real security that any of us has comes from the skills we have developed by working and the work experience we put on our resumes. The economy is in for some harsh conditions going forward. The more we can get Americans working, the better they will be able to weather the coming storm. A little kick in the ass might hurt, but in the long-term, it’s for the best.

News

North Carolina passes bill to prohibit discrimination against religious and political groups

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From Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

The North Carolina House passed a measure last week to prohibit university administrators from denying facilities, funding, or recognition to political or religious groups on the basis that they are exclusionary.

The bill came in response to Christian groups that have been stripped of their student organization status because they did not allow students with other beliefs to become leaders in their organization.

The bill, which has now been passed by both chambers of the North Carolina legislature, awaits Governor Pat McCrory’s (R) signature.

“Our society is engaged in an ongoing cultural battle,” said Rep. Bert Jones (R), the bill’s primary sponsor. “There is a war on God…Unfortunately these efforts have been extended to our campuses.”

[…]“We need to make clear that just because a student decides to attend our public schools and universities … that does not somehow mean that the student forfeits his rights to the university. This bill also recognizes that there is an important difference between education and indoctrination coercion,” Jones said.

The bill passed the North Carolina House of Representatives by a vote of 78-37 last Wednesday. All 37 votes against the bill were cast by Democrats.

Lest you think that universities are not really doing this to Christian and conservative clubs, here is an example.

From the radically leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.

After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.

In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

[…]The consequences for evangelical groups that refuse to agree to the nondiscrimination policies, and therefore lose their official standing, vary by campus. The students can still meet informally on campus, but in most cases their groups lose access to student activity fee money as well as first claim to low-cost or free university spaces for meetings and worship; they also lose access to standard on-campus recruiting tools, such as activities fairs and bulletin boards, and may lose the right to use the universities’ names.

So if you agree with the secular and liberal elites, you can form a club. But if you disagree with them, you can’t. Either way, you pay them your money.

You may also find this column by conservative professor Mike Adams to be of interest. He replies to a concerned parent who wants to know how bad secularism and leftism really are on campus.

News

Global warming killing people with ice and snow in North Carolina

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Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?
Is ManBearPig to blame for global warming?

President Barack Obama, you need to stop golfing and fix the global warming! Radically leftist CNN reluctantly reports.

Excerpt:

Get off the roads, and stay off.

That was the message in Georgia and the Carolinas as a snow and ice storm swept through Wednesday, bringing some of the Southeast’s most populous cities to a standstill.

The warnings came as freezing rain brought heavy ice accumulations from Atlanta to Charlotte. Across a large swath of the South, hundreds of thousands of people were without power and thousands of flights were canceled.

Calling ice the biggest enemy, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal declared a state of emergency. School districts canceled classes and government offices were shuttered in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the traffic paralysis caused by a storm last month.

Up to three-quarters of an inch of ice was expected to accumulate in Atlanta and up to 10 inches of snow and sleet were expected in Raleigh and Charlotte, making travel treacherous.

Also in the storm’s path were Virginia and Washington, with much of the Northeast to follow.

All federal offices in the nation’s capital were ordered closed, and thousands of employees were being told to stay home, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

[…]More than 600,000 customers were without power in the Southeast, power companies told CNN. About 180,000 were Georgia Power Co. customers, the utility said.

South Carolina was the hardest hit, with about 220,000 customers without electricity, while Wilmington, North Carolina, accounted for more than 58,000 outages.

The utilities said Wednesday morning they expect those numbers to rise over the next 24 hours.

Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, warned that hundreds of thousands could be without electricity for days.

[…]At least 10 deaths have been blamed on the weather, including a 55-year-old man who was killed in a head-on collision in Virginia, authorities said. Two people were killed in Georgia, and two died in North Carolina, they said.

In Texas, three people died when an ambulance driver lost control on an icy patch of road outside of Carlsbad, the state Department of Public Safety said. A patient, a paramedic and another passenger were pronounced dead at the scene.

In Mississippi, authorities blamed the storm for two traffic deaths.

Meanwhile, former NASA climate scientist finds that 95% of global warming predictions have failed when measured against actual global temperatures.

The Daily Caller reports:

Environmentalists and Democrats often cite a “97 percent” consensus among climate scientists about global warming. But they never cite estimates that 95 percent of climate models predicting global temperature rises have been wrong.

Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer says that climate models used by government agencies to create policies “have failed miserably.” Spencer analyzed 90 climate models against surface temperature and satellite temperature data, and found that more than 95 percent of the models “have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH).”

[…]Climate scientists have been baffled by the 17-year pause in global warming. At least eight explanations have been offered to explain the lapse in warming, including declining solar activity and natural climate cycles.

We are spending millions and even billions trying to stop this global warming, but clearly, we aren’t doing enough. We need to borrow even more money from our children, otherwise they will be burned to cinders when the Earth turns into Hell.

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