CPAC North Carolina- Donald Bryson

Y'all are a lot more enthusiastic about Mark than you were about me, good gracious. I don't know how to follow that. I thought that was phenomenal. He's a very talented speaker, he's a phenomenal speaker. Well done, Mr. Robinson. I'm Donald Bryson, I'm the president and CEO of Civitas Institute and Civitas Action. How many of you have heard of Civitas? Woo, all right, we got some people. All five of you, appreciate you. No, we're a public policy think tank and advocacy group, either one of us. We're based in Raleigh and we focus on what's going on in North Carolina. In a state policy in North Carolina, we do a lot of polling. You've probably read about the Civitas poll. Of course, everybody believes polls now, right? Because everybody got it right in 2016, right? No, but we do try to keep a pulse on what people in North Carolina think. Just so all the liberals in the press, though I repeat myself, right, don't tell us the wrong story about what's going on. But I'm not here to talk about polling, I'm not here to talk about Civitas, I'm here to talk about North Carolina. North Carolina has just gone through an amazing decade of economic success. People, and there are a lot of people in this state that don't know where we were 10 years ago. At the height of the Great Recession in 2010, North Carolina had the third highest, third highest unemployment rate in the nation at 11.5%. Conservative leadership came into the General Assembly after the 2010 elections, and we started seeing automatic reforms going in place. We saw tax reform, regulatory reform. We let the economy open itself up and grow itself, to which we became the fastest, at one point we were the fastest growing state economy in the nation at one point. And that all has to do because we had conservative Republicans in the General Assembly who passed good policy and got it passed, and we had Pat McCrory signing those bills. And that was very well done. And what did it take to slow that amazing decade of economic success down? The Chinese letting a virus loose on the nation. That's what it took. It took a global pandemic to slow North Carolina down. But now, the other side, the left, has plans for North Carolina, and they're not pretty plans. And if you want to go to the Civitas website, you can go to nccivitas.org and look at Wrong Way N.C., what the left really wants for North Carolina. And what do they want to do? They want to roll back all those tax cuts we've seen over the past 10 years and hike your taxes, not just your income taxes, but your employer's taxes and your sales taxes. And while they're doing that to fund the public school system, that won't teach your kids, but it will make sure that the teachers get paid more money. How do we, why do we measure the success of a public school system by how much we pay the adults? How does that work? Why do we worry about that? What else do they want to do? They want to expand Obamacare in North Carolina. And don't worry, Roy Cooper has his own version of the Green New Deal. All of these things are due to come to North Carolina. And what's it up to? Well, elections have consequences, right? And on top of that, the reason they have consequences is because people vote on public policy once they get into office. And it's up to us to be ever, ever vigilant, not only after this election's over, I know we all want to rest when November 3rd comes, I know I desperately want to take a nap. But after November 3rd comes, Congress goes back into session, the General Assembly goes back into session, and we have to be very vigilant of our liberty. We have to be eternally vigilant of that because what did President Reagan say? The extinction of liberty is just one generation away. And that's when we have to keep watching. My name's Donald Bryson, I'm with the Civitas Institute. Thanks for being with me today.