You can find the state-by-state income tax comparison by S.C. Chief Economist Bill Gillespie that Cindi Scoppe wrote about in her column today by following this link. If that doesn’t work, you can go here and select State Individual Income Tax Comparisons for Tax Year 2005 on the left.
And here’s the draft of a less-complex analysis from the state treasurer’s office.
That’s all. Now you can go back to looking at fun stuff.
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So what’s the point? Is she arguing that we have room to increase taxes? or just taking a shot a Governor Sanford for spinning statistics a certain way (just like the Department of Education does)?
We pay too much in taxes. Everybody does.
Doug, the point is that the governor of South Carolina, in order to try to sell his unfounded notion that taxes are relatively high in our state, constantly misrepresents the tax burden.
When you consider that the governor uses his bully pulpit to push for this one thing harder than for anything else (even vouchers), this is of the foremost significance.
We’ve got a hell of a lot of things that need doing in South Carolina. Cutting the income tax isn’t one of them. But our governor ignores the facts because his is an abstract agenda that bears no relationship to the world. It is shaped to conform not to what you find in South Carolina, but to what the Club for Growth would LIKE for him to find in South Carolina.
That’s important. For South Carolina, it’s probably a lot more important that the stuff I write about, but I leave this to Cindi because she has the temperament for poring through the figures, and I don’t.
And unless you meant it as an ironic comment on the vagaries of human nature, along the lines of “you can’t be too rich or too thin” (both of which are patently untrue, but they draw a smile), then it is absolutely impossible to support your last statement. There is no such overarching thing as either “too much” or “too little” when it comes to taxes; it all depends upon the situation. And when you say “everybody,” you make your statement independent of situation.
How about this then:
“The general public pays more in taxes than the value they would receive for those outlays if given to an entity that was accountable and rewarded for superior performance. The efficiency of government in spending tax dollars does not match that of the private sector.”
We had this discussion at our breakfast meeting. There is no example within government that matches the performance of the top private companies. Government programs perform worse as they increase in size. The best government agencies could not survive in a free market environment.
OK, Doug, you go move to where the streets and police and other services — such as enforcing the property rights and contracts that make the “free market” possible — are handled by the private sector. Good luck with that.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. There is nothing preventing government from costing less than a private competitor, since it doesn’t have to factor in a profit — except the fact that you would never allow government to operate as freely as a business. You will always demand accountability in the way it is run (that’s the source of bureaucracy), and you and your neighbors who disagree with you will pull it in different directions so that it will duplicate and add services that a private entity — which, like a monarchy, can choose a single direction and focus its energies in that direction without deviation — would never consider.
Basically, it’s a ridiculous comparison. A person who understands how the world works — say (ahem) a person who gets 93.33 percent on a certain quiz — would never make the comparison that you make. Government and the private sector do different things, and they — by their very natures — do them differently. Comparisons are meaningless.
Look at it this way — and a person who is going to live in society, rather than as a hermit in the woods, HAS to look at it this way: If you pay for, say, a school system, and that school system costs more than it otherwise might because it does things (say, teach Russian, or administer standardized tests) that you think are wasteful — but other citizens, whose input can and must be valued every bit as much as your own, disagree, which is why the system does that.
You could say that such a system therefore costs too much. But it would be childish to say so. If you understand how a republic MUST operate, you recognize that NO public entity can or should operate the way it would if YOU were in charge.
And if you REALLY understand how the world works, you understand that there are a lot of things that the market simply won’t deliver — we have to work together as a community, through the thing we call government (and any arrangement we came up with among ourselve would, by definition, BE government), to provide them. If you don’t think such things should be thus provided, make your argument and try to win elections. But if you lose, take it with good grace, and don’t go whining about the taxes. Your alternative is to go live in another country, and in most cases you would quickly find out that the “burden” you fretted about in the Land of the Free wasn’t burdensome at all.
There are some segments of government that do work well because they serve the greater good. Police departments, fire departments, libraries, public health clinics.
You’re the one who says I should accept the excesses of government spending on politicians pet projects and the excessive bureacracy that comes with an unaccountable government. I don’t agree.
Is the DMV the best we should expect of our government? Is a transportation agency that can’t get bridges fixed but can pave the road of a politically connected person right away the best we should expect of a government system? Is the best we should expect of our government that kids go hungry every day in Columbia while our elected representatives decide how many millions of dollars they can funnel to local Okra Struts and Peach Festivals?
I have faith that individuals are better at solving the common problems of society than government can. And I can provide examples all day long.
Come on, Doug, this is neither fair nor remotely accurate:
I have never, ever said anything of the kind. To the contrary, our page is all about exposing waste, and calling the unaccountable to account. The single largest, most sustained effort in which I have engaged in the 20 years I’ve worked at this newspaper is the herculean task of poking, prodding and blasting our forms of government, from the local to the state level, into a form that is accountable to the people of this state.
Here’s the distinction between our position and that that you and the governor seem to share: We believe the Legislature wastes money that could be used to the greater good in many ways. Given that such basics as public safety and health, our penal system and yes, schools (in the rural areas, at least) are seriously underfunded and as one would expect, also underperforming, a rational person would say that a lot of that money should go to those statewide priorities rather than to okra struts or whatever. Maybe some of it could be dedicated to some tax reductions as part of the badly needed overhaul of our entire tax system. Someone — and it has always been our preference that that someone be a governor who has responsibility for ALL the state’s services and can therefore set priorities amongst them — needs to set an agenda that targets the money to where it ought to go: better-targeted spending, or tax cuts, or depleted reserve funds, or whatever.
Unfortunately, we have a governor who LACKS most of the powers a governor should have (responsible for administering only about a third of the executive budget), and who believes that spent money is by definition wasted money. His priority — instead of campaigning effectively among lawmakers to get the greater powers that he and subsequent governors should have — is to push for tax cuts.
Spending is not always preferable. Tax cuts are not always preferable. Neither is ALWAYS preferably, unless ideology blinds one to realities.
Finally, the tie between accountability and bureaucracy… Bureaucracy is one of the main tools by which the people hold government accountable. They do this NOT because government is inherently or chronically unaccountable, but because we have a much, much higher standard of accountability when it comes to government — and so we should. We as customers don’t need a watchdog to make sure that the private company CEO doesn’t paper his office wall with hammered gold and employ a sexy secretary who takes care of him on the side, or who waltzes out with a "bonus" worth millions. It’s none of our business. If his board cares about that stuff, they can do something about it — but the saps will probably lavish that stuff on him of their own free will. The only business we have with him is through our transaction, and the only accountability we demand is that the product work.
We have far more nitpicking standards about how the public executive can behave, how he can be compensated, and what use he can make of public resources — to cite but one kind of accountability. Far more important, and far more central to the nature of what government is about, NO service can meet the public standard without incorporating many competing priorities at the same time. And if we think about it, we wouldn’t have it otherwise. A private company can be wildly successful by doing business with a tiny fraction of the population. A public entity has to please, to the best of its ability (and the best, even with the smartest, most dedicated people in the world running it — take your pick; name your dream team) will be a sort of compromised tolerance, and perhaps the occasional warm feeling.
Doug, we go on and on and on about the need to reform DOT. We don’t go on at all about the need to reform General Motors, as poorly run as it is. Why? Because it’s just not the public’s business in the same way.
Therefore, a lot of this can be laid at the feet of the media. But the problem isn’t so much that we keep telling you about things that are wrong with government. The problem is that some people don’t understand that it’s the role of the press to be all over government that way. It sure as hell doesn’t mean that the private sector, which by comparison (not entirely, but by comparison) we leave to its own devices, is superior. It’s that we expect more of the public sector, and have the right and the duty to expect more.
I work for state gov.
You only think you know how much waste there is.
You have no idea. It is worse that you will ever believe.
Whole departments with nothing to do.
Full time staffers wilth 2 hour a day jobs.
You just have no idea.
America is great because of the collective works of great individuals, not the great work of individual collectives.
Here’s two organizations to compare: Fed Ex and the U.S. Postal Service. Which one would you invest your money in? If you need a package delivered tomorrow, who do you send it through? Why? Could it be one has accountability and the other doesn’t?
As long as our government has enough money to waste on political earmarks, our taxes are too high.
Then you’ll be relieved to know, Doug, that we can’t afford to waste a penny on those things. So your taxes aren’t too high.
And Doug — name one private business that will come to your house, pick up a document, and deliver it to any address in the country a day or two later, for 41 cents. After you do that, call Netflix and ask why — when its business is based on getting DVDs to customers the very next day — it uses the postal service.
I was in Memphis during the years Fred Smith was building FedEx. He got the idea from the fact that with business becoming more and more computer-based, businesses had to have a service that would absolutely get a computer part to where it needed to go the very next day. FedEx is based on providing a high-end product — next-day delivery, for which you pay through the nose.
It’s a lot like private education. Pay enough for it, you can get whatever you want out of an educational experience. But that is absolutely NOT the answer if you want to educate the entire population. Why? Because the market — the complex web of exchanges between individuals — does not have a motivation to educate everybody. The community DOES have that motivation.
That takes us back to what I said before: A private entity only needs to do business with a fraction of the population — those who desire and can afford the service — to be wildly successful. That model is far too expensive to be applied to things that go under the heading of basic societal infrastructure.
Brad,
You really don’t want to get in a discussion with me about the Postal Service. I worked as a contractor for USPS from 1995 to 2006.
I saw how “efficient” they were. The gory details are only possible in a government agency.
For example, would you believe that there are still approximately 7000 post offices in the country that use a PC with a 5.25″ floppy disk to record daily sales and then use a 14.4K modem to transmit that data to a computer made by a manufacturer who hasn’t existed since 1997?
When I started at USPS in 1995, an older man who was a long time USPS employee was just returning to work after suffering a stroke. He came to work every day, sat down in his office and went to sleep. At the end of the day, he would put on his hat and go home. This continued until 2003 (eight years). Every year he got a performance review stating he was meeting the objectives of his job. He didn’t do a a single thing for eight years and was paid more than $70K for his efforts. Can you see that happening at The State – where you can’t even get an admin to open your mail?
Or the programmer in Minneapolis who told me he intentionally would put bugs into the programs so he could collect overtime for fixing them.
The game in the government business is to find the organization where nobody does anything and each person covers for the other one. When you’ve got a monopoly, particularly a government monopoly, you have very little to worry about in terms of accountability. Then, in order to actually get work done, the government agency contracts out for consultants at exorbitant rates (the costs of which are then passed on to the monopoly’s customers).
They charge 41 cents because a bunch of government bureaucrats created a bizarre rate system that only allows them to charge 41 cents. They lose money on every single piece of first class mail. It’s the same business model that forces them to keep a post office open in the tiniest of towns, paying the Postmaster $50,000 per year while only bring in $500 in revenue. They keep the small post offices open because Congressmen want to keep the voters happy.
Would you be open to allowing competition from private industry in delivering the mail? Won’t happen. Did you know the government owns your mailbox?
Your response about Fedex doesn’t answer the question – why are people willing to “pay through the nose” for a service when they could use the Post Office to do the exact same thing? Because performance matters.
Why can’t USPS compete with Fedex or UPS on delivering packages and overnight mail? They had a HUGE headstart in the way of infrastructure, marketshare, and staffing. Why did that happen? Easy answer – because the private sector can do it better.
Doug writes: “They charge 41 cents because a bunch of government bureaucrats created a bizarre rate system that only allows them to charge 41 cents. They lose money on every single piece of first class mail. It’s the same business model that forces them to keep a post office open in the tiniest of towns, paying the Postmaster $50,000 per year while only bring in $500 in revenue. They keep the small post offices open because Congressmen want to keep the voters happy.”
And I write:
Doug, that’s what political accountability is — running things in a manner that keeps the voters happy.
It’s also why we have a postal service — because the consensus of people in this country want to be able to send a letter for 41 cents. If everything else about the service (which most people don’t use) is overpriced to pay for that, it doesn’t matter, because we have something that we value, and which the private sector would never have the motivation to provide. Sure, there are “loss leaders” in the retail sector, but not on this scale.
And why do you suppose government offices use outdated equipment? Could it be that we have a country full of tax-hating libertarians who would go ballistic if they updated every three years?
And why do we have a post office in every tiny town? Because that’s what we want. You can say you don’t want it, but the people who DO care about it more than you do, and in the aggregate there are more of them, and they get it.
It’s not a “business model.” Businesses have business models. A government agency is supposed to do what the people, expressing their wishes through they’re elected representatives, want them to do. Just because YOU don’t want them to doesn’t mean the model is faulty.
Where it fails is when lawmakers look out for narrow interests at the expense of the greater good. That can be counterbalanced by a leader with a compelling broader view. Our problem in South Carolina, and the reason lawmakers are able to ignore the governor (theoretically, the guy with the broad view) and pass out pork as they please, is that cutting the income tax and filling the reserve funds is not a compelling vision for this state. The voters might elect Sanford, but they don’t side with him against lawmakers who give them festivals, because he doesn’t have a compelling argument for doing something better, something for the greater good, with the money.
Brad,
Wrong again. The Postal Service is not funded by taxpayers. It has not been since 1982. It is a government supported monopoly.
From http://www.usps.com:
“The United States Postal Service® is an independent establishment of the Executive Branch of the United States Government. It operates in a businesslike way.”
That’s a good one!
Wrong also the the technology spending issue. They spend billions on technology every year but since they are staffed mainly by career bureaucrats, the money is spent foolishly – since there is no accountability, performance doesn’t matter.
If they had more to spend, they would spend it foolishly as well. For example, spending several hundred million dollars on new point of sale terminals but splitting the work between IBM and NCR – thus creating two incompatible systems and spending even more money to make them work together. A CIO in the “real world” who made that decision would be fired.
Again, I can give you ten years worth of evidence on this topic.
You are willing to accept lousy performance by the government, I’m not. Your justification is based on the idea that all of us should chip in to pay for lousy performance so that some of us can get services we wouldn’t be able to pay for individually.
“A government funded monopoly.” Cool.
Seriously, though, you got me on that one. I knew the Postal Service had a unique status that made it only quasi-governmental, but I’m always forgetting the nature of that status.
Good thing there wasn’t a question about THAT on the quiz.
Tell you what, since you’re the expert on the business applications front: Once you get the Postal Service straightened out, come tell me how we can get up to date at the private-sector entity I work for.
You know what I write my columns in? Word 6. Why? Because for publishing, we are dependent on DewarView, which won’t run a later version of Word — at least, it won’t without a hugely expensive upgrade.
All of which is cool, because it took us about three years to get to where Word and Dewar and QuarkXpress all worked together smoothly, and frankly, I’m not eager to go through all that again THIS decade.
Basically, it makes business sense for us to be outdated.
Here’s another example of how government “works”:
I pay property taxes. More than my neighbor because I have one more bedroom than him. Do I get any more services for my extra money? Nope. Same police, fire, trash, schools, libraries, and recreation. Okay, we’ll get passed that inconsistency.
So, my son and I like to play basketball. Hey, wait a minute. My property taxes pay for the community recreation building in town. There’s a basketball court there, let’s go use it. What? What do you mean I can’t use the court? Because the court is reserved for leagues who pay additional money to use the court I pay for? Oh, I see.
Wait – I have another idea. I pay taxes for the schools that are down the street. There are several basketball courts outside the school and it’s a weekend, so let’s head on down, son, and make use of those facilities we pay for. Here we go! Wait.. what are these fences that encircle the entire school grounds? What do you mean I’ll be trespassing if I jump the fence and try to use the courts? This is PUBLIC property, right? for the benefit of all the taxpayers?
So I guess if I jump the fence (that I helped pay for with my taxes) to play on a basketball court (that I helped pay for with my taxes), I will be hauled off by the police department (that I help pay for with my taxes).
That’s our government in a nutshell.