Category: General
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Harris and Walz take a cue from TIGC, head to South Georgia
Well, dang. Who knew Kamala Harris and Tim Walz read “Trouble in God’s Country”? Actually, they almost certainly don’t. But it’s one heck of a coincidence that they announced a South Georgia bus tour less than a week after TIGC suggested exactly that. Well, not exactly that. I recommended putting Coach Walz (and members of…
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Can Coach Walz get the Democrats back in the game in rural Georgia?
(Note: About three months ago, I started writing a weekly “Trouble in God’s Country” column that now runs in about 30 daily and weekly papers, mostly in South Georgia. As a result of that work, however, I’ve been a little distracted from my usual TIGC research, but I’m trying to get back to that now.…
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The TIGC 2022 Georgia county rankings: Per Capita Income
This is the second in a series of posts ranking Georgia counties by various socioeconomic measures. About a week ago I did an initial post ranking the counties based on their population growth over the past three years. Now I’m shifting to economics. In this post, I’ll look at per capita income (PCI), but I’m…
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Introducing the TIGC Georgia county rankings. First up: Population
This is the first in a series of pieces ranking Georgia’s 159 counties by various measures. I’m starting with population and will follow up with rankings for various economic, educational attainment and population health metrics, possibly among others. Eventually I’ll combine all those individual rankings into what I’ll call the TIGC Power Rankings. One of…
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CDC and AJC confirm what TIGC has been telling you for years: rural Georgians are dying younger than their urban cousins
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution led Wednesday morning’s print edition with a story headlined “Georgians in rural areas more likely to die early.” The story was based on a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I’m glad to see my long-ago employer covering this issue, but it’s not exactly like this…
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More than half of Georgia’s counties in bottom national quartile for health outcomes
One of the things I’ve been working on lately is a piece ranking all 159 Georgia counties nationally on a range of socioeconomic measures. The last chunk of data I needed was the 2024 release from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHRR). That report hit the web on March 24th, and I’ve decided it merits…
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Can Brian Kemp make Paul Krugman feel better?
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, seems even gloomier than usual these days, especially about the state of rural America. He recently went up with a column headlined “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” which he called “arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy.” He added: “I have no…
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Would ‘special rural districts’ be a first step down the slippery slope to county consolidation?
In a curious bit of legislative strategy, the House Governmental Affairs Committee last week combined a couple of bills that didn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with each other. House Bill 1253, as originally written, would have overhauled the way appointments are made to the boards of directors of the state’s 12…
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Georgia vs. North Carolina, Chapter II: Educational Attainment
The second in a series of occasional posts comparing Georgia and North Carolina.
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One government program’s 30-year metamorphosis from well-intentioned economic development initiative to bloated tax giveaway
Recently I learned the General Assembly had established a joint House-Senate study committee to evaluate the various tax credits the state offers as economic development incentives. As it happens, I’ve been working off and on for a while now on a piece about Georgia’s Job Tax Credit (JTC) program and can save the committee some…