Author: Charles Hayslett
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TIGC’s slightly belated hot take on Tuesday’s PSC massacre
Georgia Democrats have historically done a good job of registering voters and a lousy job of getting them to the polls. On this past Tuesday, they did a much better job on the second part. The drubbing of two incumbent Republican Public Service Commission members, Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, was by any measure historic.…
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Elections really do have consequences
Pregnant women in Franklin County and neighboring areas of northeast Georgia can no longer deliver babies at St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital just outside Lavonia. But Georgians and, indeed, all Americans now have the privilege of being able to buy gun silencers without having to pony up a $200 tax. How, you might wonder, are…
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TIGC makes the AJC’s Politically Georgia podcast
Yours truly is on today’s edition of the AJC’s Politically Georgia podcast, and, apparently, I’d had sufficient coffee to keep from making a complete idiot of myself. Many thanks to Patricia Murphy and Greg Bluestein for having me on the show.
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Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post
With almost every TIGC post I write, a bunch of stuff usually winds up on the proverbial cutting-room floor. There are various reasons for this. One is that I generally try to hold the length of my posts to around a thousand words. Another is that sometimes I get a little sloppy and forget to…
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Mapping the death of rural Georgia
About a decade ago, still fairly early in my TIGC noodling, I came across an article about declining birth rates in rural areas in some other part of the country. Gee, I wondered. What’s the situation in rural Georgia? As it turned out, that was easy enough to figure out, thanks to an excellent public…
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Ranking Georgia’s counties on key economic, education, and population health metrics
As some TIGC readers know, I’ve been concentrating lately on stirring my research into some kind of semi-coherent book form. As part of that process, I’ve been updating a lot of data, and fairly regularly I run across buckets of numbers that are worth a quick post. This is one of those times. Over the…
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An overdue update on Georgia’s premature death performance
My 15-year trip down this Trouble in God’s Country rabbit hole started as the result of the almost accidental discovery of a massive gap in population health between Georgia’s most and least healthy counties. I was conducting some research for a public health-related campaign my public relations firm was managing, and I was looking specifically…
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More on Georgia’s Quality of Life “F” grade from CNBC
Last Thursday I put up a short post about CNBC’s 2025 “Top States for Business” and the fact that Georgia ranked 7th overall and had scored particularly poorly in the network’s Quality of Life category. Georgia ranked 45th out of the 50 states in that category (down from 40th in 2024) and earned an F…
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CNBC puts out latest “Top States for Business” rankings, and guess what …
CNBC, the nation’s leading business network, came out this morning with its 2025 list of “America’s Top States for Business” and awarded top honors, once again, to Geor — Oh, wait. No. Not Georgia. North Carolina. Georgia, whose leaders have been crowing for about a decade now about the No. 1 state for business award…
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Rural Georgia voters apparently believed Trump wouldn’t cut Medicaid. Oops.
I was motivated by a couple of things when I started working on “Trouble in God’s Country” more than a decade ago. The first was that I was convinced by research I was conducting that the socioeconomic divide between Georgia’s haves and have-nots was bigger than generally understood and getting worse year after year after…