Archives: Joseph Coletti

Program Evaluation Division has served a useful purpose, but it was limited in what it could recommend. Partisan staff can more easily identify solutions, provide strategic advice, and answer “why” questions.

Each government agency and program is created to do a job. Legislators should regularly review those jobs and how programs perform them. Regulatory sunset reviews provide a good model to emulate.

An uncertain economic time is not good for borrowing. If the state takes out debt and the post-COVID economy turns out to be smaller, then debt capacity will shrink and the debt will end up taking more from other priorities. If the economy recovers quickly, then the state would have more money available for capital anyway.

Since each state’s business restrictions temporarily sacrifice jobs to save lives, a reasonable question would be, “How are states doing?” That is the point of the Covid Misery Index, which measures each state on jobs lost per million state residents since February and the number of Covid-related deaths per million state residents.

North Carolina state government continued to have strong finances seven months after the economy first began to slow in March. Budget writers should nevertheless be cautious about adding spending commitments, however.

As Milton Friedman often remarked, the bill always comes due. Today’s spending must be paid by taxes, regardless whether those taxes were collected in the past, are collected this year, or will be collected in the future.

“Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax. … The thing you should keep your eye…

The middle of an economic and public health crisis, when people are worried if they will still have work in December and the federal budget deficit is in excess of…

DHHS has never been transparent with its data, its processes, or its decision criteria, which has undermined trust in what it has reported and stoked suspicions when it has made revisions.

Just before Labor Day, Gov. Roy Cooper signed the final bill appropriating money from North Carolina’s $3.6 billion share of the Coronavirus Trust Fund. He was clearly under duress. A veto of the bill that passed with large bipartisan majorities would surely have been overridden.