I’m going through my somewhat-quarterly process of clean up. Precarious piles of news clippings, policy studies, magazine pieces, government reports, and letters are steadily shrinking to at least a height unlikely to tip over. I’m running across letters I should have responded to weeks or months ago (to all correspondents: please accept this blanket apology). And I’m rediscovering ideas I had for Daily Journal that either 1) never made sense as full-length columns or 2) I lost in the pile.

So allow me the opportunity to lay out a few of these little nuggets of information for you to sample. I hope you find some tasty, or at least not soggy.

• Which Tax to Cut?

In Washington and in Raleigh, fiscal conservatives are making the case for tax relief to shift a slow economic recovery to a higher gear. But given tight budgets, what’s worth doing now? I think that the most bang for the buck will  be found in cutting the marginal tax rate on capital gains.

There are many good ways to reduce the tax penalty on investment and encourage business development. But if job creation is a priority – and in North Carolina, it should be – then my money would be on capital gains. It has had a strong historical connection to the creation and growth of small and medium-sized businesses, the very ones that create most new jobs. Plus, you often get offsetting revenue gains from capital gains tax cuts in the short runs, as investors are induced to sell assets they have held a long while. Don’t worry about the criticism that these sales are depressive. That’s foolish talk. If investors see lower taxes as an opportunity to shift their dollars from old to new investments, that’s good for the government budget in the short-run and good for the economy in the medium- to long-run.

In North Carolina, we should remove capital gains entirely from our income tax liability. For high-end taxpayers, that would be a savings of 8.25 percent on investment gains – a huge incentive to stay and invest here. The static revenue loss from the tax cut would likely be substantially offset by revenue gains at the state and local levels as new investment bids up land prices and gets people back to work.

• Work Works in Welfare Reform

The debate about whether to educate and train welfare recipients or push them quickly into the workforce has now been largely settled. Since the passage of federal welfare reform in 1996, reform programs centered around immediate work increased the income of recipients by nearly $3,000 while education-based programs boosted recipients’ income by only $1,300. As the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector wrote in reporting these data: “The best job-training program is a job.”

• Teacher Certification Crumbles

A report published last year by the Abell Foundation looked at studies that supposedly establishment a link between teacher certification and student learning. Abell (not an ideological outfit) located 150 studies that teacher unions and others had pointed to as proving the value of certification. The Foundation determined that most of these studies were “astonishingly deficient” and did not rely on rigorous measurements and sound science. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a union-backed group that supports certification, responded to the Abell study by defending 19 of the 150 studies in question.

A somewhat underwhelming defense, it would seem.

• More Research on Dumb Growth

The indispensable Randall O’Toole has done some analysis of housing prices and growth rates around the U.S. His conclusion undercuts yet another thesis of the Dumb Growth (some call it Smart Growth) thesis that homeownership is harmed by urban freedom (some called it sprawl). He found that there was little correlation between the rate of population growth and home prices. There was, however, a strong relationship between land-use regulations and home prices. Ditto on homeownership. The effect is particularly strong, and adverse, for minorities looking to buy homes.