by John Hood RALEIGH — It’s hard not to play along when children come up with cute untruths. For example, for a time one of my boys used to tell me confidently and matter-of-factly that if he didn’t go to bed, the moon would not rise. It was a reasonable conclusion based on his personal experience at the time (he was around three years old). Later, of course, his bedtime changed, he began to notice the moon in the sky even during the daytime, and concluded differently. Unfortunately, many politicians have yet to grow out of the toddler phase when…

by John Hood Every argument has three parts: definitions, premises, and logical reasoning. When conservatives and progressives disagree about a specific issue, each side often leaps to the conclusion that the other side is being illogical (or dishonest, or stupid). In my experience, however, most disagreements don’t stem from faulty reasoning. We usually disagree because we don’t accept the same sets of facts. Or we define our terms in very different ways. For example, are the incomes of North Carolinians and their counterparts in other states diverging in unfair and dangerous ways? Are the richer getting richer and the poor…

by John Hood RALEIGH — If you think about regional differences in North Carolina politics, economics, or culture in terms of urban blue and rural red, you are missing a thick slice of the story: the suburbs. And, no, you can’t just paint the suburbs purple. That’s an oversimplification. Precisely distinguishing between the three categories — urban, suburban, and rural — isn’t easy. Classifications by county can be valuable, of course, but they suffer from severe analytical limitations. For example, lumping all residents of Mecklenburg County together as “urban” is problematic. While it’s true that living in a suburban neighborhood…