Jon Sanders

Jon Sanders (twitter.com/jonpsanders) is Director of Regulatory Studies at the John Locke Foundation. A regular columnist for TownHall.com, Sanders has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, ABC News online, FrontPage Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, the Philadelphia Inquirer and numerous newspapers throughout North Carolina. A native of Garner, N.C., Sanders has been an adjunct instructor in economics at North Carolina State University, and he holds a masters degree in economics with a minor in statistics and a bachelors degree in English literature and language from N.C. State.

Recent Research

Catch Shares: A Potential Tool to Undo a Tragedy of the Commons in NC Fisheries

May. 2nd, 2012

Declining fish stocks are affecting N.C. fishermen and fishing communities despite the U.S. government spending $70 million a year to bail out failing federally managed fisheries under traditional management systems. Catch shares are a transformative approach to fisheries management that inject property rights into the fisheries to produce a sea change in incentives. Catch shares eliminate race to fish, encourage a more discriminating harvest, and reduce bycatch. Research finds strong links between catch shares and improved economic and biological performance of fisheries and that switching fisheries to catch share systems not only slows their decline but possibly stops (or even reverses) it.

Just Not Worth the Gamble: The NC Education Lottery's many problems have a common solution

Feb. 2nd, 2011

The North Carolina Education Lottery was sold as a way to boost education spending, but N.C. boasts the same problem found in other lottery states: a declining rate of spending for education, especially in comparison with the rest of the state budget. Furthermore, poverty, unemployment, and property tax rates remain the best predictors of lottery sales.

A Million Wasn’t Enough? Montgomery County commissioners want even more tax money

Oct. 18th, 2010

Montgomery county commissioners have raised the property tax by nine cents over the last two years, from 58 cents to 67 cents per $100 valuation — a 15.5 percent increase. Now the commissioners want $225,000 tax increase (an amount about the same as another one-cent increase in the property tax). If voters approve this tax increase, the total tax increase over the last three years would be $2.1 million.

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