Opinion
Help workers truly earn higher wages
As automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence keep evolving, the market for entry-level and low-skill workers will adjust accordingly.
Opinion
Gov. Cooper’s flawed logic on choice in education
Cooper is not opposed to funding the education of wealthy children in public schools, so his objection is about controlling where those public dollars go — favoring public schools over the freedom for parents to choose a private school.
Opinion
Remote work yields benefits and costs
Remote work accounted for only 7% of work days in 2019. By 2023, the ratio was four times higher. The employment rate for disabled workers also shot up.
Opinion
Get off the voter ID merry-go-round
North Carolinians want their election laws to include a photo ID requirement. They’ve made this clear many times. In 2018, a large majority of voters chose to add such a requirement to the state constitution. Critics of voter ID know full well they represent a small minority of North Carolinians. They don’t care. Defining the...
Opinion
Yes, they’ll waste our money again
We will probably never know how much of our money was squandered during the pandemic by reckless politicians. But here are two damning numbers to start with: $400 billion and $855,000 per job year. The first is a reasonable estimate of unemployment-insurance payments either improperly paid or stolen by fraudulent claimants. As you may remember,...
Opinion
Government got COVID mostly wrong
I’m a liberty-minded conservative, not an anarchist. I think government is inevitable and necessary but its legitimate scope and practical competencies are rather limited. The many public-policy failures during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the point well. For the most part, these failures were about competency, not legitimacy. As I argued when the COVID crisis began,...
Opinion
Housing prices reflect changes in work
It was bound to happen. The percentage of adults working from home has fallen significantly from its pandemic-era peak. Nevertheless, telecommuting has established itself as a lasting and consequential fact of modern life. Before COVID struck in early 2020, the share of full paid workdays performed at home by Americans aged 20 to 64 was...
Opinion
Prison reform is hopeful sign
The state was sending some offenders to prison who might best be punished by other means, which was increasing the cost to taxpayers as well as the risk that such offenders would commit subsequent crimes.
Opinion
No. 844: California Dreamin’ for UNC President’s Salary
North Carolina's taxpayers are being nickeled and dimed to pay the exorbitant salary of the new UNC president.
News
UNC Board Rejects Supplements
CHAPEL HILL — Ever since NC State University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox announced she was leaving to head up the University of California at San Diego, UNC officials have been discussing concerns over how the system pays chancellors and ways to address those concerns. Some argued that UNC institutions rely too much on the state and that UNC should instead should use private donations to supplement chancellor salaries. In July such talk was tabled when members of the UNC Board of Governors opposed a supplement plan. The practice was previously used in the early 1990s, but was ended in 1997.
Opinion
Political indoctrination on campus?
Are claims that some professors use their classes more to indoctrinate students in their own political ideology than to teach them anything true? Or are they like Elvis sightings? Liberal faculty members and administrators often scoff at such complaints, saying that the students who lodge them are just hypersensitive gripers.
Opinion
Call. 62: Racial Preferences, Grade Inflation Hurt Education, Students Say
While most students favor ethnic diversity on campus, they oppose compromising fairness and high standards to achieve it, according to new survey by Zogby International. The study, commissioned by the New York-based Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition (FAST), interviewed 1,004 randomly selected college students nationwide.
