As more data is becoming available, it’s now clear that Georgia’s economy will be particularly hurt by the sequester.
USA Today’s Services lay out sweeping state-by-state spending cuts suggests that defense cuts will cost Georgia 17,163 jobs, the 5th worst among the states.
I posted earlier today about the suddenness with which the Georgia legislature has pushed some major changes to the tax code. The measure — HB 386 — was exempt from the ordinary rule for bills to be approved by at…
[UPDATE: Click here for a more recent post on this subject.] The most important business conducted in this year’s Georgia legislative session might be wrapped up at almost the last minute. It looked for the last two and a half…
I think over the long run Sunday sales will have minimal impact on total sales of beer, wine, and liquor in the state. To me, the issue was never really about increased tax revenue, but simply about freedom — freedom…
HOPE isn’t going under this year, but the long term funding picture is grim, as has been widely reported. Lottery sales seems to have plateaued, while the number of students hoping to go to college in Georgia is increasing along…
Please note that this title and post are not about municipal budgets, but about the financial security of individuals and households. From the AJC’s Georgia is dead last in financial security: The study by the Washington-based Corporation for Enterprise Development…
Last spring I wrote about Georgia democrats’ hopes to change HOPE. Now democrats in the state legislature are filing a variety of bills that would guarantee larger scholarships for lower-income Georgians and seem to shore up HOPE’s very shaky long-term…
The press release from the Governor’s office says that there were “mixed results” in the state’s December revenue numbers. It’s a refreshing bit of non-hyped analysis, but I’d say that the numbers are decent and are reflective of the slow…
You can read the entire State of the State address here. Governor Nathan Deal delivered it last evening (Tuesday) to the Georgia legislature. As I noted in a post yesterday about some of the Governor’s economic initiatives, I find the…
I’ll circle back around and make some comments about various specifics here soon. My initial impression is that this is a surprisingly modest agenda given a) the problems facing Georgia’s economy and b) the fact that governors rarely seem to…
Some major reorganization of Georgia’s state universities and colleges has been in the offing for a long time. In the AJC today, Chancellor: Proposed consolidations are right approach, details the four proposed mergers: — Augusta State University and Georgia Health…
In my City Talk column today, I talk about cuts to education in Georgia over the last few years. I just want to follow up here with a post about total government employment in Georgia using Georgia Department of Labor…
Georgia has some lousy trends in terms of jobs right now, but both income taxes and sales taxes suggest increases in average incomes and in consumer spending. Here’s the latest data for November, with comparisons to November of 2010. There…
I had been working under the assumption that Governor Deal would successfully persuade some reluctant Georgia lawmakers to move the date of next year’s referendums on regional transportation sales taxes (the so-called TSPLOST) from the summer primary to the November…
