Perdue: ‘Tax The Heck’ Out of Sweepstakes Business

Governor Perdue has yet another idea for getting more tax revenue. Carolina Journal’s Barry Smith reports about Perdue’s press conference.

Gov. Bev Perdue wants to “tax the heck” out of sweepstakes business across North Carolina as a means of providing more funding for education.

“I will never turn my back on the kids of North Carolina,” Perdue, a Democrat, said during a hastily called press conference on the south side of the state Capitol Thursday morning.

Perdue was critical of the GOP-controlled House’s budget that did not adopt a sales tax increase that she had recommended. She had proposed that revenues from the tax increase go to increase education budgets.

“You’ve heard the horror stories all year,” Perdue said, listing things such as teachers and teachers assistants losing their jobs and teachers having bake sales to put school supplies in their classroom.

Horror stories???

“The road to freedom is, effectively, free enterprise.”

I hope you’ll take a few moments to read a great interview by JLF’s Mitch Kokai with Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute. Brooks has released a book titled The Road to Freedom. Kokai talked with him for Carolina Journal Radio. Here’s a sample.

Kokai: In writing The Road to Freedom, what do you set out as the road?

Brooks: The road to freedom is, effectively, free enterprise. The road to freedom as a society is free enterprise. And the reason I say this is in response to a common mistake that people make in the conservative movement: understanding free enterprise as nothing more than an economic alternative, as a way to be more prosperous, as a way to make more money, to be the richest society in the history of the world. 

In point of fact, that’s not the important thing about the free-enterprise system. It’s not an economic alternative; it’s a moral imperative. What I show in this book, The Road to Freedom, is that the road to freedom for us as individuals goes through the system that allows us to earn our success — the fairest system that rewards merit, and a system that literally is the only one that can lift up the poor by the billions around the world. That’s the free-enterprise system. That’s why it’s the road to personal freedom. That’s the road to freedom for people, true freedom.