The state budget passed for the 2022-23 fiscal year fails to adequately address the impacts of inflation. Even with federal aid and a robust recovery driving higher than expected revenues, the state budget fell short of meeting the challenges created by inflation running at a 40-year-high in several ways...
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Must Reads
The 2022 Living Income Standard soars to new heights When COVID-19 arrived, few (if any) pundits predicted inflation would become one of the most fretted-over issues in 2022, but here we are. Supply chain disruptions, pent-up demand, war in Ukraine, and myriad other factors have made it harder and harder for many working families to make ends meet.
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I’m trans. This year I turn 30, and my teenage self would be beyond surprised — not just at the joys that fill my life, but the fact that I’m alive at all. I’m part of the last generation that didn’t quite have the language for the feelings that flooded us as kids. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t take off my shirt as I stomped through puddles with my pals, why I was never invited to the sleepovers I actually wanted to go to, or why I seemed to be the only one that couldn’t quite envision my future self as a devoted wife and mother.
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In "The Politics of Judicial Elections, 2019-20," Brennan Center for Justice experts explain how and why special interests are spending more than ever on state high court races In 2019–20, state supreme court elections attracted more money — including more spending by special interests — than any judicial election cycle in history, posing a serious threat to the appearance and reality of justice across the country.
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When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck in 2020, the world witnessed the most racist elements of the U.S. criminal legal system on broad display. The uprisings that followed Floyd’s death articulated a vision for transforming public safety practices and investments.
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Experts call for feds to adopt anti-racist policy redesign WASHINGTON — A new research paper reviewed how each state implemented a federal program that has provided cash assistance to low income families over the last 25 years—and found that Black women with children repeatedly were excluded. On a call with reporters Wednesday, policy experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities...
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A new 'must read' report from authors Gene Nichol and Heather Hunt of the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund at the UNC School of Law provides a powerful and damning examination of the ways in which poverty has become, in the words of one knowledgeable attorney, "the foundational principle of what's going on" in North Carolina's juvenile justice system.
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New report says “Opportunity Scholarship” voucher programs undermine public education, foster division, and undermine children’s development while also costing the state millions During the 2020 legislative session at the North Carolina General Assembly, lawmakers made changes to the state's Opportunity Scholarship program that will cost the state approximately $272 million over the next 10 years...
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[Editor's note: As a part of an ongoing effort to help North Carolina voters become better informed and to use their knowledge in casting ballots in the 2020 election, experts at the North Carolina Justice Center (parent organization of NC Policy Watch) have prepared a series of brief and informative voter guides on 14 key policy issues.
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Impact would be even larger than previously forecast due to the COVID-19 pandemic The Trump administration was expected to file briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court today asking justices to strike down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional. In anticipation of this event, analysts at two major Washington, DC policy think tanks released reports this week...
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In late 2016, the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund issued a significant report on state access to health care entitled, “Putting A Face On Medicaid Expansion in North Carolina.” The study not only heavily documented the dramatic economic, social and health costs resulting from the state’s decision to refuse the proffered expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, but it focused (somewhat atypically) on the stories of patients, families, doctors, nurses and other health care providers to illustrate, more concretely, the often tragic impact of the denial of expanded coverage on the lived experience of Tar Heels.
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High Point is not what comes to mind when thinking about the hungriest metropolitan area in the United States. A small city of about 114,000 people, located in North Carolina’s Triad region (with Greensboro and Winston-Salem) (Map 1), High Point has long been at the forefront of the state’s prominent, and almost defining, furniture industry.
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On Wednesday, the Center for Children and Families and a Research released our ninth annual report that tracks children’s health insurance coverage at the state and national level. This report looks at two-year trends from 2016 to 2018 analyzing American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau. We believe this is the first national report to look at this two-year time period, a time during which our nation moved from implementation of the Affordable Care Act...
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New toolkit gives North Carolina parents know-how to “Get the Lead Out” of school drinking water With “back to school” in full swing this week, Environment North Carolina is releasing a new free toolkit to help parents, teachers and administrators "Get the Lead Out" of school drinking water.
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Medicaid expansion is not just a moral imperative — it could provide a much-needed tonic for the fiscal ailments that many rural hospitals face in North Carolina. Legislative leaders’ refusal to expand Medicaid has deprived hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians of lifesaving medical care and has left rural hospitals dangling in the fiscal winds.
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A new report released this morning finds that expanding Medicaid in North Carolina would create more than 37,000 new jobs and insure approximately 365,000 more people. The report was prepared by researchers at The George Washington University with funding from Cone Health Foundation and the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust. In addition to the new jobs created and the hundreds of thousands of uninsured residents gaining coverage, the researchers estimate...
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