If you pay attention to the pages of the News & Observer, or listen to other local media soothsayers, you will over time derive their principles of economic growth for our great state. But most people haven’t the time or the patience for that, so here are many that I’ve been able to glean:
- Pay job seekers to stay unemployed for nearly two full years so as to avoid taking a job just to earn money and thereby being ‘chained to their jobs‘
- Raise sales tax rates across the board
- Don’t raise sales tax rates on services in conjunction with decreasing income tax rates, because the poor pay for services and can’t afford higher costs
- Hike service costs through occupational licensing‘s effects instead
- Suffer no cuts to income taxes at all
- Oppose cutting corporate taxes across the board — treat the idea as corrupt crony businesses taking advantage of poor North Carolinians
- Decrease corporate taxes for renewable energy firms, film productions, and a select few other businesses if we like them
- Raise electricity rates on everyone — poor people, families, schools, warehouses, businesses, etc. — and force people to buy from those same renewable energy firms because tax cuts still aren’t enough to keep them afloat and we really like them
- Fight reductions in regulation and bureaucratic red tape
- Fight a modest increase in regulation of abortion clinics to be on par with regulation of other outpatient medical clinics — drive home a rhetorical case that protecting the privacy of women in such intimate, unguarded situations is sacrosanct
- Give men unquestioned access to girls’ dressing rooms and bathrooms so as to project properly aligned concern for civil rights
- Push policies that boost outsiders’ perception of the North Carolina’s “progressive image,” which is an economic growth key
- Force a massive increase in wage costs on business across North Carolina, even the poorest counties — more than doubling the minimum wage to include forcing wage hikes on companies paying workers, for example, $9/hr., $10/hr, … even $14.50/hr.
Have I missed anything? I would hate to leave out any one of these great economists’ plan for a powerhouse North Carolina, shackled as it is by policymakers cruelly enslaving it to empirically sound principles for economic growth.