Author: Charles Hayslett
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Today’s must-read: The AJC’s piece on the shifting balance of power between Atlanna and Notlanna
I don’t think I’ve ever given a whole post to someone else’s story, but Greg Bluestein’s piece in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the shifting balance of power between Atlanna and Notlanna earns it. The story is here, though it may be behind the AJC’s paywall. The best line in it comes from Rick Dent, who…
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Rick Jackson’s campaign got front-page treatment for a healthcare plan with very few numbers. Here’s a little arithmetic.
Tip your hat to whoever runs communications for Rick Jackson. On Tuesday, September 8, the Republican nominee for governor stood in a ballroom at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter and made a promise with an unmistakable cadence to it. “ … On day one,” Jackson pledged, “I will close the coverage gap with intelligent Medicaid expansion.”…
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Go Forth and Subtract: A Progress Report on the Great Republican Fertility Advantage
Back in 2019, a young up-and-comer in the Georgia Republican Party was predicting a bright future for his party on the grounds that God-fearing, conservative, Christian women would happily produce more babies than their godless Democratic counterparts. “Christian and conservative women have a 35 percent fertility advantage over Democrat women,” Brant Frost V, then the…
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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.