The South Carolina Policy Council

What Will ‘Obamacare’ Mean for You?

THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT IS ABOUT TO BE A BIG PART OF YOUR WORLD The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, has already begun to take effect on the nation’s taxpayers and economy. Over the next year, as The Nerve reports today, South Carolina employers will be faced with serious – and [...]
Bureaucratic Middle Men in State Government

FOR GOVERNMENT, IT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO SPEND MONEY South Carolina’s state budget now tops $24 billion – a staggering sum (and just to put that in perspective, remember: a billion is a thousand millions – and state government takes 24 of those out of the private economy for just one year). [...]
Why Ethics Reform?

2013 WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE ‘YEAR OF ETHICS REFORM.’ IT WASN’T. SO DOES ANYONE CARE? At the conclusion of the 2013 legislative session, as the Senate prepared to vote on the legislature’s only attempt to reform the state’s ethics code – the bill was killed – Senator Luke Rankin (R-Horry) made the claim that [...]
The State Budget: What Are You Buying?

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR PURCHASES THIS YEAR? The state budget isn’t a foregone conclusion, and for the most part it’s not some legal obligation – like a mortgage payment – that can’t be altered or reduced at will. The state budget is a transaction in which the citizens pay for certain services, [...]
What’s South Carolina’s Biggest Employer?

IT’S NOT WHAT POLITICIANS TELL YOU What industry would you guess is the biggest employer in South Carolina? Listening to State House politicians, you might think the answer is one company, Boeing. Or you might think tourism is the number one employer in the state. In reality, government is the single largest employer in South [...]
Income Disclosure—Why It Matters

THIS ISN’T JUST A THEORETICAL DEBATE With the launch of SCPC’s Project Conflict Watch – and now with the release by Senator Vincent Sheheen of his tax returns and challenge to Gov. Nikki Haley to do the same – the issue of income disclosure is gaining some well-deserved attention. The principle behind it is [...]
Does S.C. “Live within Its Means”?

TECHNICALLY, YES. IN EVERY OTHER WAY, NO. Twenty-four billion is a large number. No one has ever seen 24 billion dollars all together, so it’s difficult to imagine an amount of money that large. But apparently, according to South Carolina’s lawmakers, it takes this mind-bending amount of money to run the state for one year. [...]

TheNerve.org

Is there a shortage of solid, well-written investigative news in South Carolina? Sadly, yes. If you want to know what politicians are doing with your money, THE NERVE is your source.

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Freest State in the Nation?

Ever wonder why free-market reforms are virtually impossible to pass in a state as “conservative” as South Carolina? There is a reason – and there is a way forward.

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Join us!

Making South Carolina the freest state in the nation won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen easily. It’s taking long hours, hard work, and help from our friends, too.

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About

The South Carolina Policy Council was founded in 1986 by the late Thomas A. Roe of Greenville. Since then, our mission has been to promote freedom, to protect freedom, and to prove that freedom works. We are dedicated to restoring citizens’ power and prosperity through limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty and responsibility.

We don’t believe politicians and government “experts” have the answers, and we don’t believe it’s government’s role to run our economy. We believe politicians are employees, not celebrities, and accordingly our goal is to encourage them to do their most important job – in fact, their only job: protect our liberty.

Commentary

Another Useless Attempt to Cap Spending

The State Budget Shouldn’t Take This Long

How to Fund Road Maintenance

The Answer to Road Funding: Tax Hikes?

Senate Finance Budget: What to Keep an Eye On

ObamaCare by the Back Door?

Why the State Budget Grows … No Matter What

Going Backwards on Ethics Reform

Transportation Funding: The Current Options

The Ethics Reform That Isn’t

Another Useless Attempt to Cap Spending

IT’S WON’T CAP SPENDING IF GOVERNMENT GETS TO KEEP THE MONEY Yet another legislative session is about to pass in which there was some talk about controlling state spending, but nothing done. Back in February, House members introduced a bill that aimed to limit state spending by capping General Fund (GF) appropriations. Specifically the bill [...]

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The State Budget Shouldn’t Take This Long

WHY THE BUDGET TAKES HALF A YEAR TO PASS, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT It has become an almost yearly tradition for the South Carolina General Assembly to use its time so inefficiently that important legislation – including the state budget – doesn’t pass before session concludes on the first Thursday in June. With [...]

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How to Fund Road Maintenance

(WITHOUT RAISING TAXES) How do lawmakers propose to deal with the fact that South Carolina’s roads and bridges are in suboptimal shape? The governing assumption behind most answers to this question (including one Senate proposal supported by Senate Finance chairman Hugh Leatherman) seems to be that, in order to pay for road and bridge repair, [...]

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The Answer to Road Funding: Tax Hikes?

THE LATEST PROPOSAL TO FIX OUR ROADS ASSUMES STATE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY Last week, H.3412 was placed on the Senate calendar for consideration. Originally the bill would have merely shifted revenue from the sales tax of motor vehicles – currently dedicated in part to the Education Improvement Act fund (EIA) – to the [...]

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Senate Finance Budget: What to Keep an Eye On

LOTS OF PUBLIC MONEY, VERY LITTLE PUBLIC INPUT Budget debate will begin on the Senate floor today. The budget was passed out of committee May 3, and made publicly available May 8. The usual practice in the legislature allows members to have the budget for one week (three legislative days) for review. However, a vote [...]

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ObamaCare by the Back Door?

MANY SOUTH CAROLINA POLITICIANS HAVE SPOKEN OUT STRONGLY AGAINST OBAMACARE. THEIR ACTIONS TELL A DIFFERENT STORY. In March, Governor Nikki Haley publicly stated that “as long as [she is] the governor of South Carolina, we will not expand Medicaid on President Obama’s watch.” Also in March, House Speaker Bobby Harrell lauded the House budget vote [...]

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Why the State Budget Grows … No Matter What

FINES AND FEES GO UP WHEN TAX REVENUES ARE DOWN … AND WHEN THEY’RE UP, TOO For the last decade, the majority party in both chambers of the legislature has frequently claimed to espouse the principles of limited government and spending restraint. It’s striking, then, that in no sense has government been limited during these [...]

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Going Backwards on Ethics Reform

DOES THE HOUSE BILL ‘MOVE THE BALL FORWARD’? On Tuesday – just in time for the May 1st “crossover deadline” – the South Carolina House passed what supporters called major ethics reform legislation. The final vote was 113 to 7. The Nerve exposed the weirdly secretive process by which legislators rammed the bill through the [...]

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Transportation Funding: The Current Options

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM: PRIORITIES OR FUNDING? This week, the Senate Finance Special Subcommittee on Transportation Funding kicked off a series of meetings to discuss several bills that could make big changes to the state’s transportation system. At the April 23 meeting, the Subcommittee Chair said they plan to have these bills reported on by May [...]

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The Ethics Reform That Isn’t

CLEARLY, LAWMAKERS HAD GOOD REASONS TO KEEP H.3945 SECRET The talk this week has been mainly about the ill-named ethics reform bill being debated in the South Carolina House. It’s ill-named because, despite a strong provision requiring income disclosure, the bill actually weakens ethics laws in several areas. The most obvious problem with it, [...]

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