RALEIGH – Talk about your metaphorical planets aligning.

There I was on February 2, 2005, just 15 days away from the 15th anniversary of the founding of the John Locke Foundation. I was assembling a list of all of the research publications JLF has released over those 15 years – getting to well over 100 different reports and briefing papers, with some missing – and doing so on Groundhog Day.

For me, Groundhog Day is about Bill Murray. It’s about a 1993 comedy that was more than the some of its parts, that not only give Murray a chance to display his dazzling talents but also had something rather profound to say about the nature of human happiness. The gist of the story is that Murray’s character, a weatherman, gets trapped in a Pennsylvania town where the same day keeps repeating over and over.

So I’m thinking about Groundhog Day, the film, and Groundhog Day, the annual occasion of trying to predict the future. And I’m looking over pages and pages of past JLF research. Then it hits me: from a public-policy perspective, we’ve been living the same day over and over here in North Carolina.

Some examples of JLF research titles from the past:

• The Case Against Tax Hikes — June 1990
• A Tradition At Risk: Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina — May 01, 1992
• Professor Pay in North Carolina: No Evidence for ‘Brain Drain’ — July 1993
• Cut Corporate Welfare — February 27, 1995
• Fiscal Shell Game: Budget Gimmicks Misuse Federal Funds — February 17, 1997
• Lottery Temptations: Why State-Run Gambling Is A Bad Idea — May 20, 1997
• Sidetracked: Transit and Transportation Policy in North Carolina — April 01, 1997
• Budget Rises 8.8%: Gimmicks Mask Real General Fund Trends — August 27, 1997
• Growth Spurt: Gov. Hunt’s Bulging Budget Turns Back the Clock — May 5, 1998
• Spending, Not Taxes: Don’t Misstate Cause of Budget Gap — January 14, 1999
• No Floyd Fiscal Crisis: True Needs Can Be Met By Rainy-Day Fund — November 22, 1999
• Bonds Would Double Debt: Taxpayers At Risk From Dramatic Rise in Spending — May 10, 2000
• Height of Irresponsibility: Hunt’s 2001 Budget Hikes Debt, Possibly Taxes — May 17, 2000
• Recipe for Disaster: Tax Hikes Would Damage State Economic Climate — July 24, 2001

Obviously, North Carolina politicians have been discussing – and enacting – some pretty bad public policies over the years. Sometimes, our efforts and those of other institutions have shown the way to alternative solutions to state problems that didn’t make government bigger and the tax bite on average households and businesses go up. But many other times, despite our best efforts, state government stumbled.

It’s possible to draw a number of conclusions from all this political déjà vu. One is that North Carolina’s political class is being socially promoted rather than learning much of anything.

After all, the 1991 fiscal crisis was touched off by an economic downturn but set up by years of excessive spending growth. After a costly round of tax increases, the politicians just followed the same model during most of the 1990s, cutting taxes a bit but not enough to compensate for the previous hikes. Then they faced the same problems again by 2000, which they “solved” again with more tax hikes. And so on.

Another conclusion I’ve taken away from my Groundhog Day endeavor is that JLF has published a lot of material. A lot of material. I don’t even remember editing much of it, which will come as no surprise to our many, properly nitpicky, readers.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.