On the front page of the November 28th edition of the Raleigh News and Observer the paper featured a report by Justin Catanoso, a Wake forest University journalism professor. The author expressed optimism that the Paris global warming conference would produce a "binding agreement to burn less...
Published: Monday, January 11th, 2016 @ 12:31 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina lawmakers should take aim at the state's current system of depreciation, as they look for more ways to improve the tax code.
Published: Sunday, January 10th, 2016 @ 2:03 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Solar energy is said to be renewable because it is "naturally replenished." One source defines solar power as renewable because "there is an endless supply." But the truth of the matter is that in any meaningful technological, economic, or practical sense solar is anything but renewable...
Published: Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 @ 1:19 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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North Carolina's tax code penalizes savings and investment by double taxing their returns - specifically interest, dividends, and capital gains. These biases can only be eliminated by removing savings and investment from the tax base, or by eliminating the returns to saving; for example...
Published: Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 @ 11:49 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The graph below compares the temperature predictions of the major climate models to actual climate change figures using satellite data, considered to be the most accurate, going back to 1979 when satellite records began. The graph, compiled by University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologists...
Published: Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 @ 11:18 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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This year's legislative session turned out to be an ideological struggle, not between Republicans and Democrats, but between two factions within the Republican Party. (The factions exist outside the GOP as well, but Republicans control the governor's office and hold supermajorities to make...
Published: Wednesday, October 28th, 2015 @ 5:45 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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In an article from WRAL.com lamenting the fact that economic development grants made by the state of North Carolina did not "create" as many jobs as originally intended, John Skvarla, North Carolina's Commerce Secretary and number 1 cheerleader for taxpayer funded business incentives, stated that...
Published: Saturday, October 24th, 2015 @ 2:22 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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In this lecture to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers delivered this week, Patrick Moore, ecologist as well as founder and long time leader of Greenpeace, argues that the planet has actually been in a long term (50 million year) cooling trend; that long term temperature records...
Published: Wednesday, October 21st, 2015 @ 3:57 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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This year's legislative session turned out to be an ideological struggle, not between Republicans and Democrats but between two factions within the Republican Party. This tension goes to the heart of one's belief in free markets as the most moral and efficient way to organize economic activity...
Published: Monday, October 19th, 2015 @ 10:02 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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As part of his remarks while visiting the White House on his first day in the United States, Pope Francis made a strong plea on behalf of religious liberty, which he specifically directed at President Obama. This came shortly before he made an unscheduled visit with the Little Sisters of the Poor...
Published: Tuesday, September 29th, 2015 @ 3:08 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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For those of us who have been fighting to eliminate solar and other renewable energy subsidies from the burden being born by North Carolina's taxpayers, the new state budget is very welcome. As of January 1, the 35 percent tax credit for renewables in general and solar in particular, by far the...
Published: Saturday, September 19th, 2015 @ 5:18 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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I have never been a fan of the Fair Tax, a proposal to abolish the income tax and substitute a national sales tax. My opposition has nothing to do with the merits of a national sales tax as opposed to an income tax per se. Clearly, as an economist, I agree that the proper and most efficient tax...
Published: Tuesday, September 15th, 2015 @ 2:21 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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It is now being acknowledged by even its staunchest supporters that the solar industry in North Carolina is completely a creature of government mandates and subsidies and could never stand on its own without wealth transfers from taxpayers and rate payers. In other words, it is completely welfare...
Published: Saturday, September 12th, 2015 @ 4:10 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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I have never been a fan of the Fair Tax, a proposal to abolish the income tax and substitute a national sales tax. My opposition has nothing to do with the merits of a national sales tax as opposed to an income tax per se. Clearly, as an economist, I agree that the proper and most efficient tax...
Published: Friday, September 4th, 2015 @ 9:26 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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At a recent event with Harry Reid in Las Vegas President Obama accused conservatives of being inconsistent in their support for free markets. Why? Apparently because they are "not for" solar power. Here's what he had to say to the gathering...
Published: Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015 @ 4:45 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The answer is obvious. It's a minimum wage increase that prices competition out of the market while exempting companies with a unionized work force.
Published: Friday, August 21st, 2015 @ 4:19 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Economic Concept Of Crowding Out Explains How Government Money To Planned Parenthood Funds AbortionsRegardless of how one feels about abortion or Planned Parenthood generally, this article by Manhattan Institute economist Preston Cooper explains why it makes no sense to argue that government funding of Planned Parenthood is not subsidizing abortions. Cooper invokes the economic concept of...
Published: Sunday, August 16th, 2015 @ 12:30 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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In his recent article titled "Fooled by GDP: Economic Activity vs Economic Growth" for the Freeman (monthly magazine of the Foundation for Economic Education), Professor Steve Horwitz of St. Lawrence University asks and answers a very important question: Does Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure...
Published: Thursday, August 13th, 2015 @ 8:28 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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"Bringing onshore wind production to North Carolina is part of my 'all-of-the-above' energy strategy."
Published: Tuesday, August 11th, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Governor McCrory has announced that, as part of his "all-of-the-above" energy strategy (whatever that means), North Carolina will be getting its first industrial size wind-farm, part of a partnership between Amazon and a wind power company called Iberdrola. Of course, probably the most important...
Published: Sunday, August 9th, 2015 @ 4:59 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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A study just released in Nature Geoscience comes to the following conclusion, as stated in the article's abstract...
Published: Wednesday, August 5th, 2015 @ 9:32 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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Imagine that you are the CEO of a company, and there are several different materials or technologies that you can use to produce your product. For example, it is not unusual that a product can be made using steel, aluminum, or plastic. Within those categories, it can be made using different...
Published: Thursday, July 23rd, 2015 @ 4:11 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Dr. Ivar Giaever, 1973 Nobel Prize winner in the field of Physics and an Obama voter, argued recently at a conference of Nobel Laureates in Germany that global warming was a "non problem." According to a story published at ClimateDepot.com...
Published: Wednesday, July 15th, 2015 @ 6:46 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The last time any ozone (smog) monitor in North Carolina registered a reading that exceeded EPA's maximum standard of 75 parts per billion in ambient air was May 15, 2013 on one monitor in the Triad. Last year appears to have been the best on record...
Published: Tuesday, July 7th, 2015 @ 10:49 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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On Saturday, June 6, North Carolina's Commerce Department Secretary and staunch defender of corporate welfare, John Skvarla, appeared on WRAL's On the Record...
Published: Monday, July 6th, 2015 @ 7:02 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Lately there has been a great deal of discussion, even among conservatives and Republicans, about the possibility of implementing a carbon dioxide tax, incorrectly refereed to as a carbon tax. Of course carbon dioxide and carbon are quite different. But this is part of the manipulation of the...
Published: Wednesday, June 24th, 2015 @ 6:44 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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It is well known that industrial wind turbines are a danger to large birds of prey like bald eagles, and bats. Indeed, the death and destruction that these massive propellers in the sky have been causing has led the Audubon society to to give then the nickname...
Published: Thursday, June 18th, 2015 @ 9:08 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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Pick your natural resource: oil, land, copper, coal, you name it. At one time or another, it has been predicted that we will one day run out of that resource. These predictions have all been based on a false economic assumption, namely that because the physical quantity of something is finite...
Published: Friday, June 5th, 2015 @ 6:17 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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The tax foundation has just published a report analyzing the various excise taxes levied on beer in all 50 states. North Carolina comes in the 8th highest, levying a $.62 per gallon tax on those who enjoy having a couple of cold ones on a hot Saturday afternoon after mowing the lawn...
Published: Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 @ 1:03 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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In the video clip below, being touted by the McCrory for Governor campaign, Governor Pat McCrory tells business leaders at the NC Chamber of Commerce that the way to keep North Carolina "moving forward" economically is to pass the North Carolina Competes legislation - basically an expansion of...
Published: Monday, May 25th, 2015 @ 9:08 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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As reported in The Fayetteville Observer back in March: From 2007 to 2014...$421 million [was spent in the Cape Fear region] on solar projects. In the first 70 days of 2015, Dallas-based Principal Solar announced plans to tack on another $325 million worth of facilities in Cumberland and Bladen...
Published: Friday, May 15th, 2015 @ 11:17 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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As I write this, what is turning out to possibly be the most powerful crony special interest in North Carolina is fighting to keep part of its welfare money flowing. A regulatory reform bill that reduces the amount of super expensive solar energy that North Carolina electricity users are...
Published: Friday, May 8th, 2015 @ 1:23 am
By: John Locke Foundation
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There is currently a bill in the legislature, introduced and sponsored by Representative Chris Millis, that would phase out North Carolina's coercive renewable energy mandates, which were passed in 2007. At the present time, North Carolina requires that utility companies provide 12.5 percent of...
Published: Friday, April 17th, 2015 @ 8:27 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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If an industry can provide its product only by using the government to force others to deal with it, then it is not an industry that can be functional in a truly free market. This is the case for the solar power industry, including what are called third-party sales of solar-generated electricity.
Published: Friday, April 17th, 2015 @ 5:32 pm
By: John Locke Foundation
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