RALEIGH – So I’ve been watching NBC’s summer series “Treasure Hunters”. Really. It’s entertaining and even mildly educational. The contest began with 10 teams, ranging from former CIA agents to geniuses to Boston firefighters. They are gallivanting across the country, from coast to coast, following historical clues to find artifacts that will help them locate the treasure.

Personally, I’m rooting for either Team Air Force or Team Miss USA to win the game. Both are used to performing on runways. Ba-dum-pum.

For those interested in North Carolina politics and public policy, there is a far easier version of “Treasure Hunters” available now in the comfort of your own home or office. It is Agenda 2006, the sixth edition of the John Locke Foundation’s biannual guide to state and local issues. The booklet is available in both printed form and at a special section of the main JLF website.

We started the Agenda project in 1996 to collect as much information and analysis as we could in a single, easy-to-read format – as well as to encourage candidates, activists, reporters, and voters to engage in political debate on the major issues facing the state, rather than waging political warfare via personal attack, photo op, and empty promise. For each of the state or local topics covered, we offer a two-page spread that summarizes the issue, provides some historical context, and lists recommendations that we believe best reflect the theory and practice of sound government. (After publishing the briefing book in the summer before each election cycle, we follow up with an Agenda poll in October.)

Here are some of the key recommendations presented in Agenda 2006:

• Focus taxpayer dollars on core governmental functions, eliminating whole functions and categories of spending (such as corporate welfare) that lie outside the proper scope of constitutional government. Reorganize state government to reduce the number of major administrative departments to 13, down from the current 26.

• Enact a Taxpayer Protection Act to limit annual growth of state spending so that it cannot grow faster than a combination of inflation and population growth.

• Reform the state’s tax code to increase simplicity, efficiency, and equity by broadening the tax base and imposing a single, lower rate. Stop using taxes in an attempt to manipulate personal choices or economic decisionmaking.

• Eliminate the state’s educationally deficient and statistically worthless End of Grade tests in favor of an off-the-shelf national test that is a truly independent assessment and offers meaningful comparisons across time and state boundaries.

• Provide low- and modest-income families the range of educational choices already available to the wealthy (and already provided in preschool and higher education).

• Focus scarce transportation dollars where they will be most productively invested, while eschewing the kinds of transit-oriented Smart Growth policies that will increase traffic congestion, air pollution, and taxes.

• Get state and local government out of the business of attempting to pick winners and losers in the marketplace through various economic-development schemes, especially if they intrude on private property rights. The best way to make the economy more competitive is by delivering core services effectively and keeping taxes and regulations moderate.

In this case, unlike on “Treasure Hunters,” the real drama will be found not in the search for the trove, but instead in what readers decide to do with what they discover.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.