Excellent point on the numbers, but the article is otherwise well-written.
Some favorite paragraphs:
Starting in the 1920s, North Carolina took a different path to economic development than its low-tax Southern neighbors, adopting a “business progressivism” that emphasized spending on infrastructure and building a university system that would come to rank among the best in the country. For much of the last century there was generally a consensus in both parties around the idea that this public investment strategy was the best approach. The investment in the university system led to the creation of Research Triangle Park, an area stretching from Durham to Chapel Hill that’s now home to more than 170 companies. “The corporate leadership went along with the political leadership and the public investments they supported,” says Rep. Paul Luebke, a Democrat with more than two decades in office.
...
In addition, the Associated Press revealed that the legislature’s sweeping Regulatory Reform Act included provisions that weakened compliance rules for utilities such as Duke, and emails have shown coordination between the company and public officials on everything from the settlement to lobbying efforts. “We understand they have to work with companies, but we think the first responsibility of the agency is to protect the public and the natural resources, and they don’t have customers,” says Frank Holleman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “They’re not a hardware store or a grocery store; they’re a public agency that has been given the legal authority to enforce the law and to promote the public interest.”
While the state may not be as 'balanced' registration-wise as Gallup and the article claim, we progressives and Democrats certainly have a heck of a fight on our hands to try and turn things around.
-app
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