The Most Reprehensible School Choice Hypocrite of 2023

The case for school choice is simple and straightforward. Government schools receive record amounts of taxpayer money and do a relatively poor job of educating children.

There are many reasons for the failure of government schools, including natural government inefficiency, but the main reason is probably that the system is controlled by teacher unions.

Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to assert that the system is run for the benefit of the unions rather than the students.

But there’s one group that I dislike more than union bosses.

The most reprehensible group of people in this field are the politicians who send their own kids to private schools while fighting to deny other families the same ability.

I have previously written about some of these hypocrites, including Barack Obama (and his Secretary of Education) as well as Elizabeth Warren. Now it is time to highlight North Carolina’s despicable governor.

Here are some excerpts from a column by Kyle Morris for Fox News.

Democrat North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a “state of emergency” this week in an attempt to prevent a school choice bill from passing the state legislature, despite sending his own daughter to a private school in Raleigh. …Cooper, highlighting efforts from Republicans in the state as a “private school voucher scheme”… The comments from Cooper come after he sent at least one of his three daughters to Saint Mary’s School, an expensive private school in Raleigh… Jason Williams, executive director of the NC Faith and Freedom Coalition, was quick to call out Cooper’s remarks in a tweet. “Why doesn’t Roy Cooper want your child to have the same quality, private education his kid had?” Williams wrote. “If he believed so much in public education, why did he spend thousands for his own kid to avoid it?” …”What a hypocrite. Public schools aren’t good enough for his kids, but they are for yours,” Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst Kelsey Bolar blasted.

Cooper’s supposed “state of emergency” is particularly nauseating.

He was perfectly content with a system filled with schools that failed students. But the moment teacher unions felt threatened, he sprung into action with hyperbolic rhetoric.

By the way, there’s another story that reveals additional school choice hypocrites such as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and J.B. Pritzker.

To appease teacher unions, all of those people are willing to sacrifice other people’s kids. But not their own.

Utterly despicable.

P.S. The “Tweet of the Year” for 2021 involved school choice.

P.P.S. There’s strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Canada, Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

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Assessing North Carolina’s Fiscal Policy

When I first started citing the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index back in 2013, North Carolina was one of the 10 worst states.

In a remarkable turnaround, North Carolina is now one of the 10 best states.

The big improvement is partly because the state joined the flat tax club.

But there were other tax cuts as well, along with some much-needed spending restraint.

Sounds like great news, but you won’t be surprised to learn that not everyone is happy about what’s happened in the Tarheel State.

In a column for the Raleigh News & Observer, Ned Barnett opined yesterday against tax cuts – both the ones that already have occurred and the new ones that the state legislature is considering.

Republican state lawmakers think cutting taxes makes North Carolina more attractive to new businesses, but cutting taxes too much has the opposite effect. …Now, with the General Assembly back in session, they’re looking to cut some more. It’s a reckless path… Since Republicans began aggressively cutting taxes in 2013, the state has lost billions of dollars in revenue. …North Carolina has excess revenue because the state has reduced what it has historically spent as a share of the state economy – a drop from 5.8 percent to 4 percent… The state corporate tax has fallen from 6.9 percent to 2.5 percent and will be phased out by 2030. The personal income tax has been stepped down from a two-tier progressive tax with a top rate of 7.75 percent to a flat tax of 4.75 percent today. Now state Senate leader Phil Berger says the legislature should consider cutting the personal income tax to 2.5 percent.

The most important data cited above is that the burden of state government spending has dropped from 5.8 percent to 4 percent of the state economy.

This upsets Mr. Barnett, but the rest of us should view this as a major triumph for genuine fiscal responsibility.

And by imposing genuine spending restraint, North Carolina lawmakers created the “fiscal space” for meaningful tax cuts.

So why is Mr. Barnett upset? In the column, he complains that some parts of the budget are not increasing as fast as he would like. But he never offers any evidence that the state is suffering economic harm.

I suspect he offered no evidence because he has no evidence.

Or perhaps he offered no evidence because the data shows that he’s wrong.

And that’s exactly what I discovered when I checked the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s per-capita income data. Lo and behold, incomes in North Carolina are growing faster than the national average and faster than the regional average.

The differences are not huge, but it’s nonetheless better to have faster income growth rather than slower income growth.

Some of my more sophisticated friends on the left doubtlessly will point out that states in other regions still have higher overall levels of average income, which is a fair point, but it’s also fair for me to respond by noting that the cost-of-living is generally much lower in North Carolina.

The bottom line is that North Carolina’s better tax policy has the state moving in the right direction while high-tax states are moving in the wrong direction.

P.S. North Carolina also is close to being among the 10 best states for educational freedom.

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Spending Restraint Is a Necessary Ingredient for Good Tax Policy

In my column yesterday about state tax systems, I specifically noted that North Carolina has been making big improvements.

Not only did the state shift to a flat tax a few years ago, it recently voted to lower the rate from 5.25 percent to 3.99 percent.

Why did this happen?

The easy answer is that Republicans gained control of the state legislature. But that’s – at best – only a partial answer. After all, there are plenty of places where Republicans gain power and don’t enact good fiscal policy.

So maybe a better answer is that Reagan-style Republicans took control.

I suspect that’s a far more accurate answer, but I want to dig deeper and look at a policy reform that made the tax cuts possible.

Simply stated, North Carolina politicians embraced the Golden Rule of spending restraint.

And by controlling the growth of spending, they created fiscal maneuvering room for lower tax rates.

In a column for a North Carolina newspaper, John Hood, a board member of the John Locke Foundation (the state’s pro-market think tank) explains what happened.

…in North Carolina, conservative governance has actually reduced the size of state government and significantly improved its fiscal condition. …As a share of the economy, state spending has averaged about 5.8% over the past 45 years. It was well over 6% as recently as 2009. Since fiscally conservative Republicans won control of the General Assembly in 2010, however, budgets have gone up every year in dollar terms but have gone down almost every year when expressed as a share of GDP. That’s because legislative leaders have stuck to their commitment to keep annual spending growth at or below the combined rates of inflation and population growth. …That has, in turn, allowed legislators to rebuild the state’s savings reserves, pay off state debt, and finance several rounds of growth-enhancing tax cuts.

I fully agree that the goal should be to reduce state spending as a share of GDP, so kudos to North Carolina lawmakers.

By limiting annual spending increases, they have strengthened the private sector.

Here’s a chart, based on data from the National Association of State Budget Officers, showing what has happened to state spending since 2010. For background, a simple rule of thumb is that the “general fund” is money a state raises and spends while “total spending” includes that spending plus money that comes from Washington.

By the way, population has increased by about 1 percent annually in North Carolina, so per-capita state spending is only growing by about 1.5 percent per year.

All things considered, a very good job. Too bad Republicans in Washington don’t push for similar policies (to be fair, they did restrain spending during the Tea Party era).

I’ll close with a worrisome observation that North Carolina does not not have a TABOR-style constitutional spending limit.

So while it’s admirable that state lawmakers have restrained spending over the past decade, there are no guarantees that the Tarheel State will enjoy spending restraint in the future.

So North Carolina should copy Colorado and adopt something like TABOR. Or, they can demonstrate their worldliness by copying Switzerland’s “debt brake,” which is another constitutional provision to limit spending.

The goal – for the state and the nation – should be some sort of spending cap.

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Ranking State Income Taxes

Motivated in part by an excellent graphic that I shared in 2016, I put together a five-column ranking of state personal income tax systems in 2018.

Given some changes that have since occurred, it’s time for a new version. The first two columns are self explanatory and columns 3 and 5 are based on whether the top tax rate on households is less than 5 percent (“Low Rate”) or more than 8 percent (“Class Warfare”).

Column 4, needless to say, is for states where the top tax rate in between 5-8 percent.

The good news is that the above table is better than the one I created in 2018. Thanks to tax competition between states, there have been some improvements in tax policy.

I recently wrote about Louisiana’s shift in the right direction.

Now we have some good news from the Tarheel state. The Wall Street Journal opined today about a new tax reform in North Carolina.

The deal phases out the state’s 2.5% corporate income tax between 2025 and 2031. …The deal also cuts the state’s flat 5.25% personal income tax rate in stages to 3.99% by July 1, 2027. …North Carolina ranks tenth on the Tax Foundation’s 2021 state business tax climate index, and these reforms will make it even more competitive. …North Carolina has an unreserved cash balance of $8.55 billion, and legislators are wisely returning some of it to taxpayers.

What’s especially noteworthy is that North Carolina has been moving in the right direction for almost 10 years.

P.S. Arizona almost moved from column 3 to column 5, but that big decline was averted.

P.P.S. There are efforts in Mississippi and Nebraska to get rid of state income taxes.

P.P.P.S. Kansas tried for a big improvement a few years ago, but ultimately settled for a modest improvement.

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