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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Renewable Energy: What’s the State’s Role?
HOW STATE FAVORITISM HURTS TAXPAYERS AND DRIVES UP ENERGY PRICES An attempt to loosen South Carolina energy regulation and licensing constraints for the benefit of solar energy firms has gained a fair amount of attention recently. A bill now in the legislature seeks to enable a process by which solar companies lease solar panels to [...]