Author: Charles Hayslett

  • DOR’s new Job Tax Credit reporting policy: Replace county-level sunlight with statewide fog

    (Correction: This post originally reported that the Department of Revenue’s revised Job Tax Credit reports showed $2.4 billion in tax credits for roughly 740,000 jobs for tax years 2022 through 2025. Those figures were wrong, and the error was mine: in combining DOR’s revised reports into a single spreadsheet, I inadvertently double-counted the bottom-line row,…

  • Georgia’s Job Tax Credit Program: Big Money, No Oversight

    Georgia’s Job Tax Credit Program: Big Money, No Oversight

    (Correction: The chart in this post originally showed that the Department of Revenue’s revised Job Tax Credit reports showed about $2.2 billion in tax credits for roughly 650,000 jobs for tax years 2022 through 2024. Those figures were wrong, and the error was mine: in combining DOR’s revised reports into a single spreadsheet, I inadvertently…

  • Georgia’s Job Tax Credit program: a metamorphosis from rural lifeline to bureaucratic black box — and maybe worse

    (Correction: This post originally reported that the Department of Revenue’s revised Job Tax Credit reports showed $2.4 billion in tax credits for roughly 740,000 jobs for tax years 2022 through 2025. Those figures were wrong, and the error was mine: in combining DOR’s revised reports into a single spreadsheet, I inadvertently double-counted the bottom-line row,…

  • How Rural Georgia Lost HOPE

    How Rural Georgia Lost HOPE

    For the first sixteen years of its existence, Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program did something unusual for a state entitlement: it tilted toward the people who needed it most. Not dramatically, not necessarily by design, but measurably. From 1995 through 2011, the 147 counties that I call “Notlanna” – sparsely populated rural counties and the state’s…

  • TIGC’s slightly belated hot take on Tuesday’s PSC massacre

    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.…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Cutting-room floor factoids from my last post

    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…

  • Mapping the death of rural Georgia

    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…

  • 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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