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North Carolina has a public (meaning taxpayer-financed) campaign financing system for appellate court judges and three Council of State positions: Auditor, Commissioner of Insurance, and Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Published: Friday, November 2nd, 2012 @ 12:07 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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From 1929 to 1977, the State of North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 of her own people for possessing "undesirable" genetic traits in the name of eugenics.
Published: Tuesday, October 30th, 2012 @ 12:35 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Privatization is an umbrella term to describe techniques that increase competition in the public sector. Private sector entrepreneurs must constantly look for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency to maintain a competitive advantage.
Published: Monday, October 29th, 2012 @ 10:27 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The "good roads" state is quickly turning into the "traffic congestion" state. Both rural and urban interstates are poorly maintained and congested.
Published: Sunday, October 28th, 2012 @ 3:20 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Public transit systems in North Carolina have become less about helping citizens move around their communities in the way they desire and more about planners gaining enough political power to impose their transportation preferences and land use fads on those citizens.
Published: Sunday, October 28th, 2012 @ 12:30 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also known as Obamacare, was passed in 2010 in a hurried process that allowed for little understanding of what was in the 2,700-page document.
Published: Saturday, October 27th, 2012 @ 10:50 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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In 2007 the North Carolina General Assembly passed far-reaching electricity regulations, typically referred to as Senate Bill 3. At the heart of this bill is a 12.5 percent "renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolio standard."
Published: Friday, October 26th, 2012 @ 11:01 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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The presence of natural gas in shale rock formations, such as in the Deep River Basin in Lee, Chatham, and Moore counties, has long been known. Hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a process to extract natural gas from shale, has been around since the 1940s but has been cost-prohibitive.
Published: Thursday, October 25th, 2012 @ 10:20 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Eminent domain is the government's power to seize private property for public use. It is a constitutional power; the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution states, "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Published: Thursday, October 25th, 2012 @ 4:32 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Much has changed for the good concerning North Carolina's regulatory environment with the passage of the Regulatory Reform Act (RRA) of 2011, tort reform, medical malpractice reform, and workers' compensation reform.
Published: Wednesday, October 24th, 2012 @ 1:28 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina takes great pride in her university system. Nevertheless, the persisting recession is affecting all aspects of the state's economy, including UNC and its students.
Published: Wednesday, October 24th, 2012 @ 12:26 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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No system of public education can thrive without a high-quality teacher workforce. The problem is that state education bureaucracies enforce certification and licensure rules that seldom distinguish excellent teachers from poor ones.
Published: Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 @ 5:13 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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One of the most controversial issues in the past few years has been the growing role of the state in providing preschool opportunities to North Carolina children.
Published: Monday, October 22nd, 2012 @ 4:48 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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As childhood obesity rates continue to rise, the debate over the role of public schools in promoting healthy lifestyles has intensified. Public health advocates contend that schools can curb obesity by banning the sale of junk food and soda.
Published: Sunday, October 21st, 2012 @ 2:38 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's child care subsidy programs represent a fraction of the nearly $18 billion operating budget managed by North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services.
Published: Thursday, October 18th, 2012 @ 3:21 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Most people think of occupations requiring licenses as those like medicine and law. North Carolina, however, has made it state's business to certify auctioneers, barbers, librarians, manicurists, and over a hundred others.
Published: Thursday, October 18th, 2012 @ 2:07 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Before passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, the United States Congress generally adhered to the principle that the federal government had no authority to undertake functions and duties not enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.
Published: Wednesday, October 17th, 2012 @ 5:31 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Support for reducing class size usually cuts across political and ideological divides, garnering accolades from legislators, policymakers, and parents alike. Nevertheless, the relationship between class size and student achievement has been the subject of scholarly debate for decades.
Published: Tuesday, October 16th, 2012 @ 2:55 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Will Rogers said, "Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago."
Published: Saturday, October 6th, 2012 @ 2:05 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Charter schools are tuition-free public schools that have more freedom than district-run public schools, but are required to meet certain state regulations, such as participation in the accountability program, the ABCs of Public Education.
Published: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 @ 3:44 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina and 34 other states have what are called Certificate of Need (CON) Laws. The purpose of CON Laws is to restrict entry into the market for medical facilities and equipment.
Published: Friday, September 28th, 2012 @ 8:47 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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School accountability comes in two forms. Either parents keep schools accountable by "voting with their feet" or states compel public school districts to administer standardized tests.
Published: Thursday, September 20th, 2012 @ 2:17 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Between 1996 and 2012, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction authored, field-tested, administered, and analyzed nearly all end-of-grade and end-of-course tests under the ABCs of Public Education accountability program.
Published: Sunday, September 9th, 2012 @ 6:50 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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In March 2012, a new survey of the state line separating North and South Carolina resulted in 93 property owners being sent, as it were, into the other state.
Published: Tuesday, September 4th, 2012 @ 7:06 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's entire "economic development policy" should be replaced with "economic growth policy."
Published: Sunday, September 2nd, 2012 @ 7:44 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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When you promise to pay someone in the future, you have a debt with him. However, were you to use cash accounting, as North Carolina's government does, you would not record it as such, because no cash changed hands.
Published: Friday, August 31st, 2012 @ 11:19 am
By: Stan Deatherage
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In North Carolina, public education is a core fiscal responsibility of state and local government. The state constitution, in the words of the N.C. Supreme Court, recognizes the right to a "sound, basic education" for every child in the state.
Published: Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 @ 10:50 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Since the onset of the Great Recession, federal legislators have rapidly expanded debt-financed aid-to-state programs.
Published: Monday, August 27th, 2012 @ 5:12 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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A majority of North Carolinians support a cap on total state spending at inflation and population growth.
Published: Sunday, August 26th, 2012 @ 2:29 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's corporate income tax violates basic principles of sound economic policy and open government.
Published: Thursday, August 23rd, 2012 @ 8:22 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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In 2012, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction will introduce new curricula and standards for all public school students. This will include the new North Carolina Essential Standards for social studies, science, arts education, and world languages, among others.
Published: Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 @ 5:07 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's tax on retail sales needs reforming. At the present time, there exists a hodgepodge of taxes on consumption and sales that show very little consistency or forethought.
Published: Monday, August 20th, 2012 @ 2:41 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's state income tax penalizes people's income-generating activities by reducing the rewards to work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.
Published: Tuesday, August 14th, 2012 @ 1:56 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Taxation is the taking of property and earnings in exchange for governmentally provided goods and services or for redistribution. Legislators may also structure taxes as a policy tool to manipulate constituent actions for or against particular goods or services.
Published: Monday, August 13th, 2012 @ 1:41 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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