Here’s more ammo to fight the anti-taxers who claim North Carolina’s taxes are bad for business. Six of Forbes magazine’s top 20 cities for business and careers. Indeed, its report is subtitled: “Raleigh, N.C., and its fellow Tar Heel metros shine in our annual look at America’s largest cities.” If you can get to the piece without smirking too much at the welcome screen’s “Thought for the day”, which is John D. Rockefeller’s chestnut, “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God” (that’s what they said at Bear Stearns! And AIG! And everywhere else!), then you’ll be on your way to finding out that business people like North Carolina just fine that way it is.

Ranking number one in the listings for the third year in a row, Raleigh is merely the leader of a spate of NC cities doing right by business.

‘Raleigh is holding up better than any other place in North Carolina,’ says Matthew Martin, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va. He cites the significant higher education presence and low manufacturing base in the area for Raleigh’s steady economy.

Keeping Raleigh company at the top are fellow Tar Heel State metros Durham (ranked third), Asheville (sixth), Wilmington (13th), Winston-Salem (18th) and Charlotte (19th).

There’s a little more blabbing on about some other cities and states, before capitalism’s ongoing crisis is summed up on a high note.

The current recession is too deep and widespread for even our best-rated cities to escape damage. Yet when things do turn around, expect many places ranked at the top to be at the head of the pack, notes Marisa Di Natale, an economist at Economy.com.

You can check out Wilmington’s take on their ranking here. No other cities seem to have much to say about the Forbes list, probably because they’re busy covering record unemployment. Just a guess.

Today’s announcement of federal aid for the automakers General Motors and Chrysler likely will prompt complaints about the supposed inability of the federal government to fix anything. Yet as writer Phillip Longman explains in the current issue of The Washington Monthly, the federal government actually has a solid track record when it comes to turning around troubled, complex priavte-sector industries.

Writes Longman:

But here’s the funny thing: any honest reading of history suggests that the federal government has quite an impressive record of rescuing institutions considered too big to fail. In addition to almost routine workouts of failed banks conducted in good and bad times by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other regulators, the list includes many large industrial companies as well. In 1971, for example, Congress extended emergency loans to failing aircraft builder Lockheed and wound up not only saving a company vital to America’s national defense and export manufacturing base, but earning a net income for the Treasury of $5.4 million in loan fees.

In 1980 it did the same for Chrysler, this time extending loan guarantees in exchange for stock warrants that, after the company returned to health and paid back its loans, yielded the government a cool $311 million in capital gains. More recently, in the aftermath of 9/11, Congress granted airlines $5 billion in direct compensation for lost business and up to $10 billion in loan guarantees, again in exchange for stock warrants. That wasn’t enough to save many individual airlines from having to undergo restructuring plans imposed by bankruptcy judges, but when Americans took to the air again they found the industry intact and offering plenty of flights. Moreover, by February 2007, airline stocks had recovered enough that the Treasury was able to sell its warrants for a net profit of $119 million, with no loans left outstanding.

Longman then goes on to discuss the federal government’s turnaround of Conrail (the former Penn Central Railroad). When it was founded in 1976, Conrail was a disaster, but due to the efforts of dedicated public managers, the company righted itself and prospered. And in 1987, the company was taken public in what was, at the time, the largest public offering in U.S. history — $1.6 billion.

According to Longman, the Conrail experience offers several lessons relevant to today’s auto industry:

When it comes to rescuing deeply troubled industrial companies that the country cannot afford to do without, Conrail’s successful managers have left us with a good checklist to follow: leave your ideology at the door, pay more attention to the engineers and managers on the ground than to the financiers in the corner offices, and remember that social returns, not profits, are the ultimate measure of success.

Did you see this on The Daily Beast? David Simon, genius creator of The Wire, gave an interview to the Guardian lamenting the dire straits of the newspaper industry.

Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,’ says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. ‘To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.’”

Y’all know I loved The Wire, so perhaps you’ll take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve gotta go with Simon on this. The egregious suits behind this country’s newspapers have really done this to themselves. They had to get bigger and bigger, and own more and more papers, sacrificing quality along the way, until they had a crisis on their hands. Every time they’re faced with declining profits (in an industry that remains profitable), they go to cutbacks, sacrificing more quality and expertise. I’m going to say it again with the Wall St. Journal backing me up: newspapers are still very profitable and certainly can look forward to staying that way. As investment banker and media specialist Jonathan Knee says,

You have to focus on your competitive advantage, which is local. When the smoke clears, the local newspaper, which may not be the sexiest part of the newspaper industry but is overwhelmingly the largest and most profitable part of the industry, will be a smaller and more-focused enterprise whose activities will be directed to those areas where their local presence gives them competitive advantage and they will continue to generate as a result better profits than the supersexy businesses in the media industry asking for government or nonprofit help like movies and music.”

That’s awesome. Not only because he used the word “supersexy” (though that would be reason enough), but also because it’s a strong dose of reality. There’s plenty of money in newspapers, if they’re managed well. Good newspapers have good journalists working for them, meaning you can’t stay good if you fire or buy out all your knowledgeable writers. Are you listening, McClatchy? Don’t keep gutting the N&O and the Observer, North Carolina can’t afford it. What would this place – with its seamy lottery, its unreliable probation system, and its nightmarish mental health system – look like if authorities knew no one was watching? I don’t want to find out.

In the video in the below post, State Health Plan Director Jack Walker, speaking at a legislative hearing yesterday, indicated that the State Health Plan is considering moving towards one of the more odious private health insurance industry practices. Health insurers “cherry pick” who they cover through schemes like charging older people more for coverage. Walker is following private industry by proposing to charge younger spouses of state employees a lower rate for coverage than older spouses.

The idea is to lower costs for the State Health Plan by bringing in younger spouses. Of course, when health insurance companies charge more to older people they make it harder for older folks to get coverage and drive up NC’s skyrocketing number of people without health insurance.

The state shouldn’t be adding to this problem – let’s fix the private insurance system instead of starting to imitate it. One of the main problems the state health plan has is that state workers are older. Or, as I prefer to say, they, like me, are experienced. Short of firing all state employees and only hiring people under 30, there is little the state health plan can do to drastically increase the number of younger workers in the insurance pool.

Why not just put everyone in North Carolina in one insurance pool? Insurers could compete on price, networks and quality, and no one would have to worry about being unable to afford coverage just because they are getting older or they have a history of cancer or another pre-existing health condition.