Category Archives: EcoDevo

USC/Clemson column

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Gamecock, Tiger team up against caps
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
WEEK BEFORE last, I ran into USC President Andrew Sorensen as he was on his way to an “unprecedented” meeting with House Speaker Bobby Harrell. They were going to talk budgets.
    What was so new about that?
    “Carolina and Clemson are talking to him at the same time,” Dr. Sorensen said. “And we’re using the same numbers.” To those who remember the old days of tigers and chickens fighting like… well, like cats and birds, over funding, this was remarkable. Mr. Harrell was so “overwhelmed,” Dr.Bobby_presidents_1 Sorensen later said, he sent for a photographer to record the event.
    “Jim and I have become increasingly close in terms of… what we want to do and how we want to do it,” Dr. Sorensen said when he and Clemson President James Barker visited the editorial board last week.
    Mr. Barker stressed that this new level of cooperation was “not because of the governor’s ‘tax.’ ”
    In his latest executive budget, Gov. Mark Sanford proposed “a one percent reduction for Clemson, USC, and MUSC that will result in savings of $3,232,091 in general funds to encourage such further collaboration.”
    “Yes,” said Dr. Sorensen, “he takes away a million from each of us to stimulate us to collaborate…. if you can understand the logic in that, please explain it to me.”
    This is not the only area in which the two presidents agreed with each other and disagreed with the governor.
    For instance, there is the governor’s proposed cap on tuition increases. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It would help me out, with my fourth child now in college.
    And I like the governor’s stated goal, which is to force consolidation and reorganization of the state’s non-system of public higher education.
    But are caps a good idea for the state of South Carolina? No, and not just because this isn’t going to convince lawmakers to cut the number of institutions.
    Tuition started shooting up when the Legislature decided to cut back on direct funding of colleges, and give middle-class voters scholarship checks paid for by poor folks suckered into playing the lottery.
    South Carolina’s public colleges have experienced a larger percentage decrease in state funding than those of any other Southern Regional Education Board state over the last decade — a period in which most SREB states increased funding.
    Of the 16 states, only West Virginia funded its colleges at a lower percentage of the regional average last year. South Carolina was at 72.45 percent of that average. North Carolina was at the top end, at 136.95 percent.
    Higher state funding means lower tuition. Not coincidentally, Kiplinger’s recently listed UNC-Chapel Hill as the best deal in the country, measured by quality compared to cost. Out of 130 public colleges listed, Clemson was 24th, and USC 31st — in spite of those tuition increases.
    Or perhaps because of them. The money to improve academics had to come from somewhere. And since the General Assembly has seen fit to turn the money over to the students, via scholarships, that’s where the institutions have turned for funding.
    At USC, said Dr. Sorensen, 96 percent of entering freshmen get “one of the lottery-funded scholarships.” At Clemson, it’s 99 percent. In fact, said Mr. Barker, “At Clemson, not one freshman from South Carolina paid full tuition” this year.
    OK, so the heads of the schools don’t want tuition caps. Big surprise. What about the students? I don’t know about all of them, but some student government leaders at USC sent a letter
to the governor last week asking for a meeting “to make you aware of our concerns with these proposals, as we feel they do not completely address the desires of students.”
    One of the signers, student body Treasurer Tommy Preston, was diplomatic about the governor’s plan when I asked about it, saying that it was “our opinion that there’s just not enough information” to know, but it seemed the caps “potentially could be harmful in the future.”
    Never mind what the treasurer thinks. What does Tommy think?
    “Personally,” he said, “I think our state has a bigger problem with higher education funding.”
    Smart kid, that Tommy.

What else did he say?

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My first version of today’s column originally started out with a summary of what Gov. Sanford considered to be most important in his State of the State speech. But I took so many words setting up that list, and then had so much trouble deciding where to go after listing those items, that I scrapped it and started over with what you see on today’s page.

Here is that first rough draft/outline, as far as I took it, anyway:

     One of the great challenges in making the most of the governor’s annual pre-State of the State briefing luncheon for editorial page editors is that you don’t get a copy of the speech until you get there.

    So you find yourself trying to eat, read the speech (which is on your lap with your notebook, there being no room on the table), ask the governor questions about it as you’re reading it, hear other people’s questions, and take notes simultaneously.

    (By the way, this is not a complaint aimed at our current governor; it was ever thus. Or at least, ever since I started going to these in 1994.)

    So after a lot of scattershot questions based on things haphazardly gleaned from the text on the run last Wednesday, Charleston Post and Courier Editor Barbara Williams had the good sense to make this request: You tell us what you consider to be the main points of your speech, governor.

    His answer, as near as I could write down while trying to get some salad into my mouth, was as follows:

  • Workers compensation
  • Restructuring
  • Holding the line on spending, and paying back trust funds.
  • Leverage private-sector investment in rural South Carolina (broadband access).
  • Education.

    On education, he said he had three main points to stress:

  • Early childhood.
  • Charter schools, for the in-between-aged kids.
  • Tuition caps at the higher-education level.

That’s as far as I got. Anyway, I thought you might find this helpful if you try to wade through the speech itself. Or maybe you won’t. Anyway, there it is.

Lake rising column

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First, take action to make
the whole lake rise
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
POLITICAL NOSTRUMS often become obnoxious with excessive application. Some simply start out that way.
    For me, one that has always fit in the latter category is “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
    I’ve never denied that there’s truth in it. At least, I intuit that there’s truth in it. I’m no economist, but it’s always made sense that if you pump more wealth into a reasonably fair and open economic system, many people’s boats — if not most people’s — should float somewhat higher. Not all boats, of course, what with the poor always being with us, but there was logic in the saying.
    I still didn’t like it. It was too devil-may-care: Don’t worry about whether everybody’s boat is seaworthy; just don’t impede the tide, and assume everything will be copacetic. It’s like something one would say over drinks at the 19th hole, followed by: “I’m fine. Aren’t you fine? Well, then everybody must be fine.”
    Oh, and don’t give me a bunch of guff about “class warfare.” I enjoy a round of golf as much as the next man. That doesn’t mean I have to adopt an air of insouciance toward society’s have-nots. So the “rising tide” metaphor always left me a little cold.
    At least, it did until last week, when I heard it put another way: “The whole lake has got to rise for my boat to rise.” That implies a sense of responsibility for raising the water.
    Harris DeLoach — chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sonoco Products — said that Wednesday, when he and other state business leaders presented their “Competitiveness Agenda” for the 2006 legislative session, which starts Tuesday.
    This is an agenda with considerable juice behind it, since it is being promoted in common by the state Chamber of Commerce, the Palmetto Institute, the S.C. Council on Competitiveness and the Palmetto Business Forum.
    The groups banded together last year to push successfully for tort reform, retirement system restructuring, a measure to encourage high school students to choose “career clusters” that help them see the point of staying in school, and “innovation centers” to connect university-based research to the marketplace.
    They had less success advocating adequate funding for highways and health care, but overall, the stratagem showed what could happen when state business leaders combine their clout and let lawmakers know they’re truly serious about some issues.
    “This time last year, I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive,” said Chamber President Hunter Howard, who has carried water for his organization in the State House lobby for many a session. But once he tried a “whole new approach… going after the Legislature with really a stick kind of approach — but in a nice way,” he was pleased with the results.
    There will no doubt be those who detect an odor of self-interest whenever business people push for anything. And there’s truth in that, too. Mr. DeLoach does want his boat to rise, after all. But the encouraging thing is that he and the others leading this coalition understand that for that to happen, the water has to rise for everyone. Rather than simply saying “I’ve got mine” and being satisfied, they are pursuing policies that — whether you think they’re smartly crafted or not — acknowledge the truth that we’re all in this together: If the least of these in South Carolina are left back, so are we all.
    Take tax reform, for instance. As my colleague Cindi Scoppe noted in a recent column, the business sector is determined not to be outsqueaked by homeowners to the extent that businesses bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden.
    But there’s good in that. Lawmakers are coming back to town this week all in a sweat to get angry residential property taxpayers off their backs, which creates the danger of overreacting yet again with little regard for the stability, fairness and efficacy of the overall tax system.
    Basically, the business honchos are saying what this editorial board has said for years — that however much emotion swirls around property taxes or some other outrage of the moment, the goal should be “comprehensive tax system reform.”
    Of course, the biz types have a few things on their wish list that most of us would never think to ask for, such as workers’ compensation “reform.” (I put that in quotes because I haven’t decided whether it’s reform or not.)
    But I’m still struck by the extent to which these business leaders seem more interested than many of our politicians in doing, as Mr. DeLoach put it, “what’s good for the whole state,” seeing that as the way to benefit them all.
    Those who reflexively distrust the private sector see it as wanting nothing more from government than to cut its taxes and leave it alone. But too many aspects of this agenda give the lie to that.
    In fact, “We’re referred to as the group that wants to raise taxes,” said Carolina First Bank CEO Mack Whittle. “Well, we’re the businesses that pay the taxes” (about 43 percent of the total, asserts the Palmetto Institute’s Jim Fields). “We have to look at the road system; we have to look at education. And if it does take more revenue, then so be it.”
    So it is that you see the business community leading the charge for kindergarten for all 4-year-olds who need it.
    It is, in large part, the kind of agenda that reflects what real pro-business conservatives — the kind who have a proven ability to meet a payroll, and a realistic grasp of what it would take to provide better paychecks for all South Carolinians — see as the state’s real needs.
    What they come up with differs necessarily from what professional “conservatives” who are all theory and no practice tend to advocate. You know, the Grover Norquists, and those w
ho would play along with them.
    Am I endorsing this whole agenda? Of course not. I haven’t begun to make up my mind about significant portions of it. Others I know I’m against. For instance, while I welcome these groups to the comprehensive tax reform cause, my colleagues and I staunchly oppose some of the particulars they advocate under that umbrella — such as imposing spending caps on local government. And we disagree with their position on the powers of the Ports Authority.
    But I do like the stated attitude that underlies much of this approach. Like Mr. DeLoach, I want to see the whole lake rise.

Another shaky start for Green Diamond

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What was the biggest mistake that the backers of Green Diamond made last time around, in terms of their ability to win over the people of the Midlands to their cause?

It was being mysterious.

They came in and announced that they were going to build something really exciting — a billion-dollar "city within a city" on undeveloped land within minutes of downtown — and then clammed up, for months and months on end. They spent that time trying to line up everyone of influence in the community that they could get on their side before telling the rest of us the particulars of their plan.

This created suspicion, and gave those inclined to oppose plenty of time to get organized before the unveiling. And by the time of the big presentation, the promoters had lost much of the community already.

So some folks are going to try again. This time, Greenville developer Bob Hughes is taking the lead, at the behest of…

Well, he’s not saying at whose behest.

This is not an auspicious beginning.

 

Column on Larry Wilson’s trial balloon

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A comprehensive plan for
making us wealthier and wiser
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
LARRY WILSON, one of the chief architects
of the Education Accountability Act, came by the office the other day and offered a pretty compelling vision for what South Carolina should do next.
    The local entrepreneur doesn’t hold elective office, and doesn’t claim to speak for anyone but himself. But the ideas he put forth are worth sharing because:

  • He is a board member for the Palmetto Institute, and that think tank is expected to join with the Palmetto Business Forum, the Competitiveness Council and the state Chamber of Commerce to set forth a unified vision for how to make the average South Carolinian wealthier. Some of these ideas may crop up in that context.
  • He is also close to the new speaker of the S.C. House, Bobby Harrell. How many of these ideas Mr. Harrell buys into and how many he has told Mr. Wilson — according to Larry’s account — just aren’t feasible I don’t know.

    Nor do I know how many of these ideas my editorial board colleagues and I will go for once we sit down and study them.
    But I was sufficiently impressed by this set of interlocked proposals that it seems worth throwing out to see what others think. If not this, we need some kind of comprehensive strategy for moving South Carolina forward. We must get beyond the usual piecemeal responses to crises and interest group demands if we’re to catch up.
    The critical element that ties all of these ideas together is the unassailable fact that education and economic development are inseparable. If we don’t realize that, we’ll continue to make 80 percent of the national income.
    I don’t have room to set out everything covered in our wide-ranging discussion, but here are the most intriguing and/or appealing ideas that I heard:

EDUCATION
    Mr. Wilson wants an Education Quality Act that includes:

  • Early remediation. Third-graders scoring below basic on the PACT would attend school year-round in the fourth grade, under master teachers or National Board-certified teachers. The teachers’ incentive? Higher pay for 230 days of teaching. He would then add a grade level at a time, on up to high school.
  • Full-day kindergarten for 4-year-olds. This would be provided at “accountable, certified” public and private schools, “financed by vouchers and integrated w/First Steps.” The money might come in part from consolidating current pre-5K efforts, and be distributed in a way markedly different from the awful “Put Parents in Charge” scheme: Low-income kids would get full funding (about $4,000 apiece). The money would go to the school their parents choose. Higher-income folks would get a tax deduction (not a credit) to help with a portion of the cost. “I’m absolutely against vouchers in the public schools, by the way,” Mr. Wilson said. “But this is an area where I think it will work.”
  • An appointed state superintendent of education.
  • A BRAC-style commission for reducing the absurd number of school districts in the state. He credited this idea to Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, citing the facts that 41 of the state’s 85 districts serve only 14 percent of all students, but account for 100 percent of schools judged “unsatisfactory” under the Accountability Act.
  • A statewide salary schedule for educators, by category and qualification. This way, for instance, Marion County wouldn’t lose good teachers to Horry just because the Grand Strand county can pay so much more.

KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
    Mr. Wilson would like to increase the lottery money going to endowed chairs from $30 million to $40 million to take greater advantage of this indispensable tool for helping our research universities to boost our economy.
    He would also push for an Industry Partners Act that would:

  • Recruit or set up companies to apply cutting-edge research going on in the state, accelerating the growth of economic clusters built around automotive innovation (Clemson), “Next Energy” development (USC) and biotech (MUSC and USC). The idea would be to market the state’s under-acknowledged assets and provide such incentives as local demonstration projects — say, running buses in the Midlands on hydrogen. The goal: to see these products manufactured here, by highly paid South Carolinians.
  • Define respective, interconnected roles for the state Commerce Department, universities, S.C. Research Authority and tech system in boosting knowledge-based enterprises in the state.

TAX REFORM
    Comprehensive tax reform, of course — the only kind worth talking about. Fortunately, while there’s a lot of talk regarding “property tax relief” as an end in itself, the climate has never been better for realigning our whole tax structure.
    Mr. Wilson calls it “tax-balancing.” He would shift the burden of financing schools to the state (the only way to standardize teacher pay and otherwise reduce the gap between rich and poor districts). A Senate panel is talking about replacing the property tax as a school funding source with a higher sales tax. But Mr. Wilson raises two caveats: Care must be taken not to raise the sales tax to the point that S.C. merchants can’t compete with the Internet and neighboring states, and the tax burden must not be shifted to businesses to the point that it stifles job creation.
    That latter point is worth considering for a reason he didn’t bring up: If only owner-occupied homes were exempted from school property taxes, gross inequality would still exist between districts rich in industry and commerce, and those without that base.
    He would also:

    “The point of all this is, it fits together,” Mr. Wilson concluded. “You can’t fix one problem without fixing the other.”
    Exactly.

Brad’s Baseball Post-Game Show

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This is a follow-up posting to address some of the comments (particularly some of those in the latter half of the string) on my baseball column Sunday.

Lee, Brent, Nathan — calm those itchy, libertarian trigger-fingers. There’s no target here to shoot at.

Read the column again. The only governmental entity involved is USC. USC is going to build a ballpark one way or the other, no matter what I say or what anyone else does. And before your hands start twitching toward your anti-tax guns, remember that the USC athletics department supports itself financially.

The issue here is whether the Gamecocks will get to play in a better ballpark in a better location. That can only happen, as I clearly stated in the column, if a private partner comes along — one that sees a way to put together a deal that benefits both USC and the investors.

Will the city need to be involved at some point? Sure. It is the source for key infrastructure, not to mention zoning and other issues. And if the city kicks in a little something — land, or a break on infrastructure costs — fine.

But — whoa, I see you going for your guns again. Hold on, pardners! I need to make two quick points that ought to settle you down a bit.

  • The first is that any material involvement by the city should be minimal. You’re probably forgetting that this editorial board rejected a plan for a dual-use ballpark put forward by the city because it had too much financial involvement on the part of the city — and therefore too much exposure of city taxpayers to cost and risk. (The mayor is still ticked because we complain about not having minor-league baseball, yet we didn’t go for his deal.) What we liked was the later deal that was offered by private investors, which had minimal city involvement. We tend to be guided by what we call the "Publix Standard." We believe it appropriate for the city to put forth the kind of incentive it did to get a supermarket downtown, as that was key to so many other goals for the city — goals that should eventually dramatically expand the tax base within the city, and more than pay today’s taxpayers back. The kind of deal we oppose is on such as the city’s awful plan to own and run a hotel. And we don’t want them essentially owning a baseball team, either.
  • Second point — The City Council’s politics being what they are, it may or may not be possible to get so much as a dime out of it. The mayor has been burned enough he seems to have little appetite for making a proposal. The council, which seems to be generally ticked at the mayor lately (perhaps over the city government restructuring panel that he convinced it to appoint?), seems inclined to say no to anything he does suggest. The city right now is a huge question mark, and whether it could participate at all will depend upon just how attractive a deal is presented to it.

The University and private partners will drive whatever happens, if anything does happen. And I surely hope it does.

Sunday column, with links

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Let’s try the American way for a change
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    WOULD YOU like Ted Kennedy to have just as much power in the day-to-day running of the federal government as President Bush? That question was for Republicans. Here’s one for Democrats: How would you like it if a President Hillary Clinton had no more control over federal agencies than Jim DeMint?
    And here’s a question for us sensible folk who don’t like either party: No matter who holds the offices, does it make any sense for the lowliest congressional freshman to have as much operational influence over, say, the Pentagon as the commander in chief?
    What if the president had to get a majority of Congress to agree on a plan before sending FEMA to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? What if Condoleezza Rice were about to seal a deal on peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the president were urging her to get it done before the window closed, but she decided to hold back because Dick Durbin or Rick Santorum had a few qualms? What if the president actually decided to fire Karl Rove for leaking a CIA officer’s name, but couldn’t do it because Congress didn’t approve?
    Would any of that make sense? Would it be an effective or logical way to run a government? Of course not. At least, I don’t think so. But if you think otherwise, then you must love the way we run things in South Carolina — and in the city of Columbia. The federal hypotheticals above are modeled on the way we hobble our governor, and the way Columbia denies the most basic authority to its mayor.
    What if the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were elected separately from the president? That’s the way we do it in South Carolina, with the top general in the National Guard chosen not by merit, but in a partisan election.
    What if the president were a part-time member of Congress, with but one vote in that body, and no executive powers? That describes the mayor of Columbia. He is just another member of City Council. City employees answer not to him, but to an unelected city manager. Any member of City Council is as much that manager’s boss as the mayor is, meaning the day-to-day operation of the city is pushed and pulled in seven different directions.
    I say all this to explain something about two long-held positions of this editorial board. There’s a consistent pattern here. On both the local and state levels, government is fragmented, ineffective and unaccountable.
    There is a reason why we don’t seem to be able to get our act together. Government on both levels is set up to prevent the desire of the voters for progress — in education, personal income, public health, law enforcement or any other way you want to measure it — from being met.
    If you think it’s fine that our state lags behind the nation on almost every measurement of quality of life, or if you like seeing something as big as the former Central Correctional Institution site as an untouched eyesore at the heart of our city for a decade, you should by all means resist reform. But if you’d like to see some action, demand change.
    Our current systems are designed to avoid accomplishing much of anything — no matter how much the voters may want results. Accountability is so fragmented and diffused that there is no one to blame or credit for what happens — or doesn’t happen.
    We believe in the American system: separation of powers, checks and balances, with each branch of government given the authority — no more and no less — to play its proper role.
    This is why you will see us continue to push the General Assembly to empower the governor to do the job he is elected to do.
    And it is why you will see a series of editorials, starting today, giving our views on the current discussion about whether to change Columbia’s system. As the commission charged with facilitating this debate completes its work in the coming weeks, we hope to hear your views as well.

Et tu, Gresham

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Rep. Gresham Barrett came by our offices to visit with the editorial board this afternoon. It was the first time I’d met him (as near as I can remember), so I felt pretty bad about entering the room late and leaving early. But Friday is our hardest day of the week, and I was hours behind already.

He had come by prepared in particular to talk about the plan he’s pushing to produce nuclear power at the Savannah River Site. He expressed optimism that he’s making progress on that front.

But before I left the board room, we made sure to ask him about his comments published that day in The Greenville News.

His criticism of the governor’s performance on economic development was of course familiar, since new S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell had said similar things last month. (And Mr. Harrell, it should be noted, has taken that act on the road. He said the very same things at my Rotary Club recently.)

But like Mr. Harrell, Mr. Barrett downplays any notions that there’s some sort of internecine spat going on among the state’s leading Republicans. Also like Mr. Harrell, he stressed that he wants to work with the governor, not against him, on ecodevo.

"I’m not here to pick a fight with the governor," he said. "He and I agree on so many different things." Nevertheless, "This is an area that we can improve." And he stressed that he himself, and others, could do more.

Still, this is an interesting trend.

For his part, when I asked him about it on Friday, Gov. Mark Sanford had little that he wanted to say — on the record. As far as what he was willing to be quoted on, he pretty much said the same things he said before, when Mr. Harrell’s comments were in the news.

July 17 column, with links

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Has South Carolina lost its way on job creation?
    STANDARD & Poor’s dramatically highlighted just how bad off our state is economically when it downgraded our bond rating (see editorial above).
    On Wednesday, new House Speaker Bobby Harrell publicly opined that South Carolina has dropped the ball on job creation and economic development.
    Former Gov. Carroll Campbell “set the standard for economic development (results) and created the model that David Beasley followed, and by following that, our unemployment rate became the third best in the country. Today, we’re third or fourth worst,” the speaker told The Greenville News.
    “My frustration,” he told The Associated Press, “is that I don’t think we’ve been focused on that Harrell since Carroll Campbell and David Beasley were governors. I don’t mean to pick on Mark, and I don’t mean to pick on Jim Hodges.”
    On Friday, he expressed frustration that anyone would think he was trying to pick a fight with his fellow Republican in the governor’s office. “I think it is a total waste of time to talk about blame and who is at fault,” he said. “I think we need to recognize where we are and prepare a road map for where we want to be, and then do it.”
    When I noted that it was inevitable that many would see his remarks as a challenge to the governor, he said: “I’m not interested in challenging anybody. I’m interested in lowering the unemployment rate and raising incomes.”
     Gov. Mark Sanford’s official reaction to the loss of the AAA credit rating was to issue a press release asserting his promise “to continue his efforts to grow South Carolina’s economy, not South Carolina’s government.” It’s tempting to dismiss that as standard libertarian/populist boilerplate, intended to win votes without saying anything.
    But it actually goes to the heart of what Mr. Sanford really believes about how he and other state leaders should go about their jobs. And that’s a problem.
    Am I saying it’s a problem that he doesn’t want to “grow government”? No. I’m saying it’s a problem that the governor fixates too much on the size and shape of government, and too little on what government needs to do and how well it does it.
    That may sound odd coming from someone as passionate about government restructuring as I am. The governor’s proposals in that regard happen to be the ones I had been pushing for more than a decade before he embraced them. But our motives are different: I want government to be more efficient and accountable because it has a huge job to do helping this state catch up with the rest of the country, and it can’t afford waste and lack of direction.
    The governor wants government to be smaller as an end in itself. He essentially doesn’t believe there’s all that much that government needs to do — just get government out of the way, and the market will take care of all.
    But the market has little interest in South Carolina, in large part because our fragmented and visionless government has neglected our roads, our health, public safety and especially the schools that strive to educate our labor force. Other states have done a far better job of keeping up the neighborhood, which encourages capital to want to move in there and not here.
    The governor’s answer is to replenish trust accounts (fine), cut income taxes (again, see above editorial) and implement an arbitrary spending cap keyed to inflation that sounds good: “(Y)ou shouldn’t grow government faster than the taxpayers’ ability to pay for it,” he says reasonably. But what he says is divorced from reality. To him, restoring funding to prior levels after years of (in some cases) double-digit cuts is “growing government.” Never mind that some of these agencies weren’t adequately funded to do their jobs before the cuts.
    (Note that I say “some.” We have praised Mr. Sanford for trying to trim or eliminate overfunded or unnecessary programs. But when lawmakers fail to go along with his targeted cuts, he wants across-the-board caps, which would further undercut the essential agencies.)
    “I don’t want to grow government, either,” Speaker Harrell said Friday. Nor is he necessarily talking about spending more money when he complains that we’re not doing enough to promote job growth. “The conversation ought to be, what is it we need to do? And then talk about what it costs to do that.” (Which is precisely how we ought to approach all government spending.)
    He suspects there’s one area where more is needed: “I think Commerce could use a little help. We’ve made Commerce a lot smaller…. We don’t want to waste any money, but we ought to look at our current level of activity and see if it’s being effective. And the results suggest it’s not.” He’d like to get past blaming and discuss this with the Sanford folks.
    Interestingly, the governor had earlier defended his administration’s efforts by boasting about how Commerce Secretary Bob Faith has restructured, streamlined and redirected the Commerce Department. In other words, he takes particular pride in Commerce being smaller. It’s one part of government he’s managed to restructure to his liking.
    As for results, “It is not just the number” of jobs, “but the quality.” Gov. Sanford said the new jobs that have been created pay 30 percent more than the state average. That’s great, if there are enough of them to pull up the state overall. But that’s not the case, which is what makes Mr. Harrell’s observations ring true.

Sanford: Airbus not a “setback”

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The governor called me a few minutes ago to belatedly take issue, in his mild way, with a short editorial we ran last Saturday. I drew a blank at first on the subject, since it had been over a week since I had read it, but it came back to me when I called up a PDF of that day’s page as we were talking.

The only thing that seemed to bother him was the word "setback."

"I don’t think it was a ‘setback,’" he said. "Some things are possible, some things are probable, and some things are impossible."

He said Gov. Bob Riley had told him he had thought Alabama had it sewn up from the start, and Gov. Sanford was not inclined to disagree.

He said Alabama had already shown Airbus they could take a wing off a ship and swing it into its destination inside of an hour. In South Carolina, that would have been a six-hour process, necessitating traveling a much greater distance. "We just didn’t have the infrastructure."

Still, he thought it was worth taking a shot at it. "We had a good site, but… we didn’t have anything right there at dockside."

And he didn’t consider it worthwhile to try to compensate for that (even assuming it would be possible) by offering a bigger incentive package than Alabama.

"We ain’t gonna do what, in all due respect, the last administration did, which was buy jobs."