From Robert Reich's blog on Sunday: Exactly a century ago, on February 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, authorizing a federal income tax. Congress turned it into a graduated tax, based on “capacity to pay.” . . . The 1880s and 1890s had been the Gilded Age, the time of robber [...]
On the eve of tomorrow’s General Assembly session, you’d like to see your legislators in meetings with their constituents, discussing their concerns about what state government should do. Well, that’s not exactly what you get in today’s General Assembly, where many seats cost more than $250,000 to win and money is always on the mind. [...]
Infographics are a cool way to present complex data; we’re trying to use more of them ourselves. Learn Stuff has a series, with the most recent focusing on unequal pay for women. Four years after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as his first law, men in nearly all sectors of the [...]
Earlier this week, the NC State Board of Elections released a report which found that, of the 6.6 million registered voters in North Carolina, 612,955 may not have a DMV-issued photo ID. The News & Observer reports that "the new analysis, which compared Division of Motor Vehicles records to state voter lists, discovered that 53 [...]
Take a minute to call Gov. Bev Perdue and encourage her to issue a pardon for the “Wilmington 10” who, 40 years ago, were convicted of an arson conspiracy during racially polarized conflicts over desegregating the city’s schools. No physical evidence tied the 8 youth and 2 adults to the crime; the only “eyewitness” was bribed for his testimony [...]
Governor-elect Pat McCrory promised to end the pay-to-play culture in North Carolina. You can hope that he will not be as crazy as current Democratic transportation officials who last week named a bridge after Lanny Wilson of Wilmington. Mr. Wilson is the mega-developer/fundraiser in the middle of the 2009 Mike Easley scandal that involved illegal [...]
“If justice and fairness are to prevail, the integrity of the court's justices and the proceedings cannot be influenced by money or even have the appearance of being sold to the highest bidder. Whenever this possibility arises, we must call on the court to examine itself, and if necessary, recuse any justice or judge whose [...]
For the latest analysis of electioneering groups spending money to influence the outcome of North Carolina’s gubernatorial, Supreme Court and other elections, see this updated report from the Institute for Southern Studies released today. WRAL reports that the volume of Republican Party money spent on ads to elect Paul Newby to the Supreme Court puts [...]
A concise column by veteran reporter and former Raleigh city council member Barlow Herget begins: “There are two, fast-moving major trends in the United States that are changing society and government. And they are connected. The older trend is the increasing inequality of income in the country. It started in the 1960s when CEO’s were [...]
Here are a couple in-depth stories that look at the money involved in a North Carolina state senate race (from the Independent Weekly) and the money involved in this year’s presidential contest (from NPR). A lot more money is expected to flood into the state senate race profiled here (Doug Berger vs. Chad Barefoot), much of it [...]