Author: Charles Hayslett
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DOR’s new Job Tax Credit reporting policy: Replace county-level sunlight with statewide fog
Well, whaddya know? One day after I reported that the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) hadn’t responded to my questions about the state’s Job Tax Credit (JTC) program, I got some answers. They weren’t very good answers, but — what can I say? — we lowly bloggers have to take what we can get. My…
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Georgia’s Job Tax Credit Program: Big Money, No Oversight
At the end of my recent post on Georgia’s Job Tax Credit program, I asked readers to stay tuned, that there was more to come. The story was one that spawned a multitude of loose ends that I had to leave on the cutting room floor. This piece is about one of those loose ends,…
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Georgia’s Job Tax Credit program: a metamorphosis from rural lifeline to bureaucratic black box — and maybe worse
This is the story of a 35-year-old program that was built to help Georgia’s poorest rural counties but has now morphed into a nearly impenetrable bureaucratic black box that – at the risk of being a little uncharitable – arguably functions as our state government’s very own political dark money machine. The program is the…
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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…
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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…