Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Carolina Enacts Conservative Ideas by JOHN HOOD Over the past three years, the North Carolina legislature has enacted Ronald Reagan's favorite tax reform, Barry Goldwater's favorite regulatory reform and Milton Friedman's favorite education reform. Yet some North Carolina conservatives of my acquaintance seem to think that the Republicans who lead the General Assembly have accomplished little. It's a strange, fascinating phenomenon. As a consequence of my writing and broadcasting work, I frequently get invitations to speak to civic clubs, community groups, university classes or other organizations around the state. During these appearances, I've been struck by just how wide the gap between public perception and political reality has become. At one recent event, I explained the economic rationale for replacing the existing federal income tax code with a simpler, progrowth Flat Tax of the kind that President Reagan and many of his economic advisers believed was the ultimate goal of tax reform. Afterwards, a local Republican activist came up, expressed his enthusiasm and asked if I thought the North Carolina legislature would ever consider enacting such a tax plan. Which is, of course, exactly what the legislature did in 2013 — a fact I had just finished explaining, obviously ineptly, to my audience. Starting in 2014, North Carolina will impose a single, flat-rate tax on a broader base of personal income. When fully implemented, tax reform will establish a flat rate of 5.75 percent, down from today's income-tax rates of 6 percent, 7 percent and 7.75 percent. The corporate income tax will also drop substantially. Before the tax reform, North Carolina imposed some of the highest marginal tax rates in the South. After tax reform, our marginal tax rates will be among the lowest. While tax reform got the lion's share of attention this year (but apparently not enough!) the North Carolina Legislature continued to pursue other ideas popular with conservatives. For example, in each of the past three sessions, the general assembly has enacted regulatory reform bills to contain or eliminate vague, costly and counterproductive rules on business. Their handiwork would have thrilled longtime Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who saw the growth of the regulatory state as an especially egregious problem. "To me," he wrote in 1974, "one of the most frightening aspects of this government by regulation is the fact that the rules and procedures are promulgated by people who were not elected to their jobs." By ensuring that new state rules are truly authorized by state legislation, and that old state rules survive periodic review or else automatically disappear from the books, North Carolina's new regulatory reforms ensure that current elected officials retain control over state policymaking — which is precisely the system that Goldwater favored. As for school reform, while economist Milton Friedman didn't invent the idea of employing parental choice and competition to improve education, he did much to publicize it in his books, columns and media appearances over more than half a century of public life. Since his death, the Friedman Foundation for Educational N.C. policymakers have turned these principles into policy by eliminating artificial restrictions on the creation and expansion of charter schools, and by authorizing a new scholarship program to assist low-income families who think their children might best be served by private schools. Tens of thousands of North Carolina students will benefit directly from these reforms — but hundreds of thousands more will benefit indirectly as district-run public schools respond to new school-choice options by improving their own educational performance, an effect that has now been documented in numerous empirical studies. While most liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents will never embrace the Flat Tax, regulatory reform or school choice, that's not the case for most Republicans, independents and moderate Democrats. They either like these ideas already or are amenable to persuasion. For Gov. Pat McCrory and legislative leaders, surely the first step is to make sure their own base knows they have just enacted Carolina versions of Reagan's tax reform, JOHN HOOD President and Chairman of Goldwater's regulatory reform the John Locke Foundation. Contributing and Friedman's education Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upancomingweekly.com. reform. Where Is Waldo? Where Is Wolfe? by D.G. MARTIN Do people in North Carolina remember Thomas Wolfe, their once famous son, author of Look Homeward Angel, whose books helped many of us get through the transformation from childhood to adulthood and opened the door to an appreciation of fine writing? Do his words still inspire new writers to open their mental guts and spill out their words and stories? For answers to those questions, I decided to play a Wheres Waldo? type game and look for Wolfe in recent North Carolinarelated books to see if I could find any evidence of his continuing influence. In What I Came to Tell You by Asheville's Tommy Hays, according to one reader, Thomas Wolfe's spirit "hangs over the novel like a shimmering mist." A young boy named Grover is the lead character. His father is director of Asheville's Thomas Wolfe house, where much of the action takes place. The father named his son after Eugene Gant's younger brother and his sister after Sudie, both characters in Look Homeward, Angel. The action begins in Riverside Cemetery, where Wolfe is buried and Hays's characters visit their mother's grave. Lee Smith's Guests on Earth is set in Asheville, so it is easy for her to have her main characters visit Wolfe's mother's boarding house downtown and his grave at Riverside. The title of Wiley Cash's debut novel, A Land More Kind than Home is a tribute to Wolfe. Here is the complete quote from Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. "Something has spoken to me in the night, and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth." Pat Conroy's new memoir, The Death of Santini, renews his longstanding gratitude for Wolfe's influence on his writing. He once wrote, "My writing career began the WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel.Thomas Wolfe taught me that the great books change you immediately and forever." Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt's inside fictional look at Charlotte, has been compared to Wolfe's treatment of Asheville. Barnhardt has one of his characters mention Wolfe as "a manicdepressive and drinker." In his award-winning first novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, Terry Roberts describes an Asheville boarding house "with its pinched, puritanical proprietor, a woman named Wolfe." Ron Rash, in The Cove, introduces "an old man, tall and gaunt, stooped through the open doorway, his hands and leather apron smudged with white dust." "W.O. Wolfe, at your service," the stonecutter said, and made a slight bow. "How may I assist?" In "Return Trip," a story in Elizabeth Spencer's upcoming book Starting Over, Wolfe's ghost plays a role as one of the story's characters insists on visiting the fire-damaged memorial at Wolfe's mother's The Old Kentucky Home boarding house. "It is for my soul," he explained. "I have got to live again. Every little bit helps. Didn't Wolfe have an awful family? I wonder how he stood it." "Think of all that talent in that one house. Busting to get out. And it did." As her characters drive away from the memorial, Spencer writes, "Gray, oldfashioned, rambling and unsavory, the old house had still managed to assert itself. The long-ago meetings, quarrels, seductions and heartaches of that big lumbering man's life, the family's torments, had all smoked up right out of the windows and porches to sit on the backseat of the car, leaning awkwardly over, speaking in their ears." Where is Waldo, I mean, D.G. Martin is Host of UNC's Book Watch Where is Wolfe? Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@ Everywhere I looked. upancomingweekly.com. DECEMBER 4-10, 2013 UCW 19