Kyle Wingfield

A Georgian who fixes up a historic house can file for a tax credit of up to $5,000. An employer that helps cover a worker’s transportation costs is eligible for $25 in state tax relief.

Each year Georgia grants billions of dollars in credits and exemptions for its income and sales taxes, some of them for far greater amounts than the above examples. But no one knows exactly how many billions.

No one knows how effective these credits and exemptions are in promoting their goals — that is, how many historic houses are being renovated instead of deteriorating, or workers getting rides to their jobs which they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. No one knows how much better off we might be if we ended some of the breaks, or enhanced them, or reduced taxes in a different way.

If we’re going to have real tax reform in Georgia, we need to answer these questions.

Changes in the headline tax rates get a lot of, well, headlines. But they are only part of the policy mix, because …

Continue reading A first step toward tax reform in Georgia »

Every time President Obama is criticized for a federal budget deficit that reaches 13 digits, a familiar chorus shouts back:

“It’s Bush’s fault!”

Well, one of George Bush’s former economic advisers is taking issue with that response. Very detailed issue.

Keith Hennessey, who blogs smartly about a number of topics, including health care legislation, takes on White House budget director Peter Orszag for a speech Orszag gave this week in New York. Hennessey’s rebuttal of Orszag’s claims, about how little control the current administration has over the budget deficit, is long but worth reading in its entirety. Here is a basic summary:

ORSZAG: All told, the entire $9 trillion deficit reflects the failure to pay for policies in the past and the cost of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and the steps we had to take to combat it.

This is brazen. Translation: $9 trillion of deficits over the next ten years are not our fault.

I have three problems with this:

1. The …

Continue reading About Obama’s ‘inherited deficit’ »

It’s a good thing Mary Norwood has voted for so many Democrats. Because she sure does look like Hillary Clinton right about now.

The biggest setback for Norwood isn’t that she faces a runoff against Kasim Reed in Atlanta’s mayoral race, after winning 46 percent of the vote to his 36 percent in a field of six Tuesday. Her prospects for winning the election outright were always tantalizing — close, but most likely just out of reach.

No, her problem lies in what this result looks like, and the way it came about. Like Clinton in last year’s presidential primaries, Norwood has lost her aura of inevitability. Will she now follow Clinton’s lead and also lose the office she seeks?

The assumption was that Norwood would enter a Dec. 1 runoff having won a healthy plurality with a sizable margin in the general election. The second-place candidate would look like just that: the best of the also-rans, but a distant runner-up to Norwood.

Two late-October opinion polls were …

Continue reading Now in a runoff, Hillary Norwood is in for a fight »

Update at 11:30 p.m.: Looks like a run-off in Atlanta barring some surprising late results. We’ll go through those late results Wednesday morning.

Update at 11 p.m.: New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine has just conceded to Republican Chris Christie, giving the GOP two new governorships. Some people, however, will point to the congressional race in upstate New York, where Democrat Bill Owens continues to lead Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, as a place where the Democrats salvaged something.

I’m on the road tonight and don’t have access to which precincts are reporting, but locally it’s surprising to me that Norwood is down to 44 percent and Reed is up to 38 percent at this point. The narrowest projections I had seen/heard were still calling for a double-digit margin for Norwood even if she didn’t win outright. If the margin stays in the single digits, Norwood will really face an up-hill battle in the run-off.

Original post:

Election results are coming in…while it’s still …

Continue reading Election night open thread; Update: Make that a morning-after-the-election thread »

Of the races outside Georgia, I’ve spent comparatively little time following the Virginia governor’s race because it has seemed like a slam-dunk for Republican candidate Bob McDonnell for some time now. But this piece by Jennifer Rubin on the Commentary blog caught my eye:

The McDonnell campaign understood the problem of a shrinking base in an increasingly diverse state. As one Virginia Republican confided to me recently, “Republicans tried running against Hispanics. It doesn’t work.” Sergio Rodriguera Jr., a young party activist and veteran of the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, had urged McDonnell back in December to reach out to minorities. He told me last week that he is pleased with McDonnell’s efforts, citing charter schools as a significant draw for minorities: “McDonnell has been a good listener, and his Hispanic-outreach events have not been token events with chips and salsa. He understands that Hispanics, like other minorities, want to live the …

Continue reading GOP would be smart to follow this guy’s playbook »

Is anyone else tired of hearing about the alleged party affiliations of Atlanta’s mayoral candidates?

Tomorrow’s election is supposed to be non-partisan. But the second- and third-place candidates in the opinion polls, Kasim Reed and Lisa Borders, have been spending an awful lot of time trying to play up their Democratic connections and brand Mary Norwood as a Republican. The state Democratic Party has even gotten in on the act by mailing some overtly partisan, anti-Norwood fliers.

Blog for Democracy, which is decidedly not a conservative site, calls this a bunch of rubbish. It details Norwood’s primary ballot selection and suggests that the Democratic Party of Georgia would brand her a Democrat if she weren’t running for Atlanta mayor. But it also highlights one reason this is potentially self-defeating for the party:

The DPG’s actions are a lose-lose for Atlanta Democrats. Let’s just say that Mary Norwood does prevail as Atlanta Mayor, then what position does this place our …

Continue reading What part of ‘non-partisan’ don’t Borders, Reed, state Dems get? »

Twenty years ago this month, we were on the verge of one of America’s great victories: the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the collapse of communism in Europe, our third liberation of the Continent in the 20th century. By the end of 1989 there was freedom once more in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Within a year, there was once more a united Germany. Within two years, the Soviet Union was no more.

If Nov. 9, 1989, was the D-Day of the Cold War, it’s true that Americans weren’t the ones breaching East Germany’s defenses. The heroes of that night were the Berliners who finally knocked down the wall after an East German Politburo member mistakenly gave them the green light, as well as the scores of their desperate countrymen who died or were killed while fleeing westward over 28 years.

Yet our country was critical to the survival of liberty in the divided city — from the Berlin Airlift to our soldiers’ fortification of its western precincts, from …

Continue reading In Berlin, Obama misses a chance to celebrate America »

I was taught to give thanks before all else. So as Atlantans elect a new mayor, let’s begin with gratitude that three solid, capable candidates lead the field.

One must look only to last year’s presidential race — or perhaps to next year’s gubernatorial campaign — to see that this isn’t always the case. Lisa Borders, Mary Norwood, Kasim Reed: Put their names in a hat, draw any of them as the winner, and we should be in good hands.

But “all of the above” isn’t an option on the ballot. My colleague Jay Bookman came to one conclusion based on the AJC’s meetings with these three candidates. Here’s how I chose the one who will get my vote.

First I needed to eliminate one of the three, and Reed made the job easy. Not because I don’t like him or find him a good candidate. On the contrary, I think his experience at the Legislature could greatly benefit Atlanta if he were mayor. Despite his line about not being “cuddly,” he is a genuinely likable guy.

And I …

Continue reading In close call, Norwood gets my vote »

Forty-five years ago yesterday, Ronald Reagan gave a televised speech that laid out much of what today’s conservatives believe, and not a few things we have forgotten and need to remember. Watch or read the whole speech here.

A couple of things in it particularly caught my eye:

1. Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

In four and a half years in Europe, I realized that there were plenty of places there for liberals to flee and find the kind of government they want, if they were ever to make good on threats to “leave the U.S. if _______ is elected.” But there …

Continue reading One of Reagan’s finest speeches »

At Reason, Peter Suderman asks a good question: Why won’t the public option die?

And don’t start by telling me that it’s oh-so-popular and yet somehow Republicans have just scared too many people –including a number of Senate Democrats — about it. If the public option is so darn popular, why is Nancy Pelosi trying to rebrand it so that people think they’re getting something other than what we’ve been discussing for months?

If it’s so popular, why has President Obama remained non-committal about it all this time? The fact is that the hypothetical public option in which millions of Americans magically receive new health coverage from the insurance fairy is popular, but a public option in which people are specifically asked to help pay for other people’s new coverage is not. Thus Speaker Pelosi’s attempt at trickeration.

The new “opt-out” idea from Harry Reid, in which states could decide not to participate in the new federal government insurance plan, is cut from the same cloth …

Continue reading Night of the living public option »