Articles tagged “crowdsourcing”
Locating North Carolina budget and tax proposal analysis
Friday, 10 July, 2009 — journalism budgetnc government crowdsourcing
North Carolina has something of a budget crisis going on. Not as severe as California’s, but one where there are a lot of tax proposals being floated as potential solutions. Here are some of the ones I’ve heard since mid-June:
- A $0.40 (or so) per-ticket tax increase for movies
- A one-percent temporary sales tax increase
- The taxation of internet-purchases where a North Carolina resident is present in the sale as an affiliate marketer. Amazon dropped their affiliate program in NC over the proposal.
- A $0.50 per-pack increase on cigarettes.
- A percentage increase in excise tax on alcohol
- Added sales taxes to services like software downloads (iTunes purchases) and personal services.
These items may, or may not be in a budget passed by the legislature. I’m curious about why these particular tax proposals make sense, or do not. I’m motivated by three factors:
- I’m a business owner, and I’m very interested in what might be coming that will affect how I operate my business.
- It speaks to the part of me that got a journalism degree 10 years ago.
- I like making sense of data.
The News & Observer has an ongoing series, The Generous Assembly about how various programs and practices consume a large amount of resources. That’s a start at what I’m looking for.
I’m not approaching this with the assumption that all government spending is good or bad. I do want to know if we are getting our money’s worth. I want to know if there’s a better way to do things. I want to know what the special-interest obstacles are and the motivations behind them. I’m not interested in getting angry at anyone. I’m not interested in political gamesmanship. Talking points do not interest me. I want well-sourced information to make an informed evaluation.
Here’s an incomplete list of questions I’m interested in seeing addressed:
Is the spending we are trying to pay for effective spending?
- Are we paying for things that we shouldn’t be?
- Are there programs – Global TransPark comes to mind – that have not met their stated goals?
- Is there a possibility those programs could be fixed?
- Is there good process to determine if a program is ineffective and shut it down?
Do these tax increases make sense?
- Are these items that are convenient to tax because they’re harder to justify?
- Because some of them are purely discretionary?
- Because they’ll make a meaningful dent?
- Are there alternative tax structures to examine?
Is there an alternate way of resolving the issue?
- Could we spend less money?
- How?
- What programs would be affected? Are we talking about eliminating kindergarten to make that happen? (Yes, hyperbole, but consequences are important considerations)
Is this the best possible solution?
- Are we getting the state’s financial house on better footing or merely staving-off disaster?
- If we’re just staving-off disaster, what do we really need to do to set things right?
How is this going to affect me?
- How much are these tax increases going to cost me?
- Are these increases offset by anything?
Answering
Two late-evening tweets got a couple of responses, with one link to NC State’s Budget Central. The other is to the Sunshine Review of the NC state budget. (Thanks, @mockernut)
I don’t have comments here, but if you find information that would add to everyone’s understanding of the budget and tax situation, write-it-up and tag it with ‘budgetnc’ on your blog or with ’#budgetnc’ on Twitter. Thanks in advance for helping me understand our state’s situation at least a little bit better.