Category: General
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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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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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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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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…