Category Archives: Priorities

Bipartisan bailout deal reached

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Maybe this did turn out to be our fiscal 9/11, pulling Democrats and Republicans together to act in the interests of the country rather than their respective parties. If so, kudos all around. We’ll no more later in the day after the historic confab at the White House with congressional leaders and both presidential candidates.

For now, here’s what The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

Here’s The New York Times version.

And here’s AP’s:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Key Republicans and Democrats reported agreement Thursday on an outline for a historic $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, but there was still resistance from rank-and-file House Republicans despite warnings of an impending panic.

"I now expect we will, indeed, have a plan that can pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis that is sill roiling in the market," Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, said as members of both parties emerged from a two-hour negotiating session.

Negotiators planned to present the outline at a White House meeting later Thursday with President Bush and the rivals to replace him, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barrack Obama.

"We’re very confident that we can act expeditiously," said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the Banking Committee chairman.

Not everyone in the closed-door talks was as optimistic. Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the only House Republican in the bargaining meeting, stopped short of saying he agreed with the other lawmakers on an imminent deal.

"There was progress today," said Bachus, the senior Republican on the House Financial Services panel.

Later, he issued a statement saying he was not empowered to strike any deals and there was "no agreement other than to continue discussions."

Both houses’ Republican leaders, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, also issued statements saying there was no agreement.

Still, the White House called the announcement "a good sign that progress is being made."

"We’ll want to hear from (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson and take a look at the details. We look forward to a good discussion at the meeting this afternoon," said Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary.

A Treasury spokeswoman said the proposal was being reviewed there.

On Wall Street, stock prices were up late in the trading day, but not by as much as earlier in the day.

The core of the plan proposed by the administration just a few days ago envisions the government buying up sour assets of shaky financial firms in a bid to keep them from going under and to stave off a potentially severe recession.

Obama and McCain called for a bipartisan effort to deal with the crisis, little more than five weeks before national elections in which the economy has emerged as the dominant theme.

McCain on Wednesday asked Obama to agree to delay their first debate, scheduled for Friday, to deal with the meltdown. Obama said the debate should go ahead.

Congressional negotiators said Thursday there were few obstacles to a final agreement, although no details of an accord were immediately available.

"There really isn’t much of a deadlock to break," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

But there were fresh signs of trouble in the House Republican Caucus. A group of GOP lawmakers circulated an alternative designed to attract private money back into the credit markets with less government intrusion.

Under that proposal, the government would provide insurance to companies that agree to hold frozen assets, rather than purchase them directly as envisioned under the administration’s plan. The firms would have to pay insurance premiums to the Treasury Department for the coverage.

"The taxpayers haven’t done anything wrong," said Rep Eric Cantor, R-Va., adding that rather than require them to bear the cost of the bailout, the alternative "pretty much puts the burden on Wall Street over time."

Boehner, R-Ohio, the minority leader, was huddling with McCain on the rescue. When asked whether the GOP presidential nominee could corral restive Republicans to support the plan, Boehner said, "Who knows?"

Bush told the nation in a televised address Wednesday night that passage of the package his administration has proposed was urgently needed to calm the markets and restore confidence in the reeling financial system.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush’s agreement with Democrats on limiting pay for executives of bailed-out financial institutions and giving taxpayers an equity stake in the companies cleared a significant hurdle.

It was not immediately clear how lawmakers had resolved differences over how to phase in the unprecedented cost — a step demanded by Democrats and some Republicans who want stronger congressional control over the bailout — without spooking markets. The idea of letting the government take an ownership stake in troubled companies as part of the rescue, rather than just buying bad debt, also has been a topic of intense negotiation.

Frank told The Associated Press Thursday both elements would be included in the legislation.

Bush acknowledged Wednesday night that the bailout would be a "tough vote" for lawmakers. But he said failing to approve it would risk dire consequences for the economy and most Americans.

"Our entire economy is in danger," he said.

Video: Ed Gomez vs. Nikki Haley

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First, I apologize for the length of this video clip, but I think it gives a pretty fair glimpse of what our interviews were like with the two candidates in S.C. House District 87.

You have newcomer Democrat Edgar Gomez challenging Rep. Nikki Haley. Four years ago, Nikki was the longshot going up against a very Old School incumbent in Larry Koon. If anything, Mr. Gomez is probably a longer shot, if only because Rep. Haley is hardly the symbol of entrenched seniority that Mr. Koon was; hers is still a very fresh face on the S.C. political scene.

On the video, you will see the candidates’ respective remarks about or answers to questions about several issues, starting with an open question about what they consider the top issues to be, then moving on to taxation, school "choice" and payday lending.

And yes, I will still be doing separate posts on these two interviews, just not today. In the meantime, you have the video.

So THAT’S who that arrogant-looking so-and-so was…

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For months now, I’ve been seeing this one photograph of this one guy, over and over, in The Wall Street Journal — almost always with stories I was uninterested in reading, so the picture just sort of registered in the background.

It was the sort of picture that no sane company publicist would ever have distributed, unless it wantedFuldrichard2_2
its CEO to be hated. And you knew this was a CEO; the picture just radiated, "I’m the kind of guy who thinks he’s really hot stuff because I’m so absurdly overcompensated." And you know, I seldom think that when I look at people. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt (something that drives some of y’all crazy, because you’re always wanting me to join you in despising somebody, and I just don’t feel like it — not necessarily because I’m a nice guy; I just don’t feel like it). But this picture INSISTED that you not like the guy. If a psychologist included this photo in a Thematic Apperception Test, I suspect there would be a surprising uniformity in the stories the subjects would tell.

Well, we’ve all been paying more attention than usual to Lehman Brothers the last few days. For tomorrow’s op-ed page, I happened to choose this Nicholas Kristof column, which in a nutshell is about a guy named Richard Fuld who got paid the equivalent of $17,000 an hour while he was running that company into the ground.

Needing art for the page, I searched AP photos for "Richard Fuld." And lo and behold, what should pop up but that very same picture that’s been half-registering on my mind the last few months. That’s it above and to the right. It was taken by Kevin Wolf at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Jan. 22, 2007. I especially like the way Mr. Wolf thought to include the satellite image of the Earth in the frame, just in case we missed the whole "master of the universe" thing going on.

And apparently, to the extent that this guy Fuld will be publicly remembered, he’ll be remembered looking like this.

Well, I feel so much smarter for knowing that now. But not nearly as smart as he apparently thought HE was.

So now I’m bailing out something called AIG?

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A little while ago I got a release from Jim DeMint that said in part:

Americans should be very concerned by the size and frequency of these government
bailouts…

Well, I am, Jim — I am. And I’d really like to see someone give me an intelligible explanation of why it was important for me, as a taxpayer who’d rather see his money spent on Iraq or universal healthcare, am bailing out yet another private company.

First Bear Stearns. Now AIG. Presumably, this was another company "too big too fail," which evokes the obvious response, "evidently not." Let’s see — we had to bail out Bear Stearns (and I still don’t know why). We didn’t have to bail out Lehman; we let that go into bankruptcy (another form of relief our government offers). We let the marketplace deal with Merrill Lynch — specifically, another private company bought it. And now, ta-da!, another private company is buying Lehman. The market at work, one would think.

So why AIG? I get Fannie and Freddie; as little as I understand about High Finance, I always understood them to have a special relationship to the government. If nothing else, you couldn’t let them go under for the same reason a Mob boss can’t let a made guy get whacked without doing something about it. You lose respect, both on your own turf and abroad. You gotta do something; you got no choice.

But why AIG? I don’t get it.

Michael Koska, S.C. House District 77

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Koskamichael_021

Sept. 11, 11 a.m. — When he first came to see us during the primaries, Michael Koska made a good impression — an especially good impression given that he was a newcomer to electoral politics. He had made himself expert on the issues that had gotten him involved — especially Richland County road needs — and showed a passion for learning about more.

He made an even better impression this time, and here’s one of the reasons why: As he said himself a couple of times in the interview, he’s learned and grown on the campaign trail. For instance, he expressed a tendency toward supporting vouchers. But it was fairly obvious at the time that he hadn’t really thought the issue through. Now, he doesn’t see himself supporting either vouchers or tax credits (last time he didn’t know the difference between them) "in the foreseeable future." He believes that our first priority should be fixing the public schools that need fixing.

Mr. Koska is the Republican nominee in a district that has long been strongly Democratic. But his views are not inconsistent with those of moderate South Carolina Democrats, and he goes out of his way to praise such Democrats as Joel Lourie and Anton Gunn (regarding a recent op-ed by Mr. Gunn in our paper, he said "ditto.") He maintains that if voters elect him instead of opponent Joe McEachern, he will be more likely to get things done, being a member of the majority party in the Legislature.

About the only other time he said anything about his party affiliation was when he expressed enthusiasm for his party’s vice presidential nominee. Much as Democrats have spoken of an Obama Effect this year, he predicted that Sarah Palin would do a lot of good for down-ticket Republicans such as himself.

But mostly he talked about his passion for better roads and affordable health care. His advocacy for fixing Hard Scrabble Road had won him a position on the citizen’s panel on transportation that recommended the sales tax hike, and he feels betrayed that County Council (led by Mr. McEachern) didn’t put the issue to a referendum. He said he believes the $550,000 spent on the study, not to mention the "valuable time, time spent away from their families" by the volunteers like himself, to have been cavalierly wasted. He is also critical of Mr. McEachern and the council for having bungled the county’s representation on the Council of Governments that doles out what road money there is in the area, allowing Lexington County to get the lion’s share of the funding for the next 10 years.

The council’s decision to borrow $50 million for new parks (including one in his area), and to do so without a referendum, while people are still dying on Hard Scrabble is to him an outrage.

He has a small business owner’s perspective on health care. His own personal experience and that of his acquaintances convinces him that the state must act now to make health care more affordable (he has no patience for waiting for the feds to do anything). It was like deja vu when he told about his daughter’s recent $1,800 x-ray, which sounded an awful lot like the x-rays for MY daughter, the one that ate my "economic stimulus check," if you’re recall. He was particularly incensed that when he asked the folks at the hospital in advance what the x-rays would cost, no one had any idea. Speaking of outrages, he thinks (as do I) that the stimulus checks were "the stupidest thing." If only, he says, that money had been devoted to upgrading the nation’s infrastructure…

Energy is another area where he has no interest in waiting on the federal government to act. He says the state should push to have natural gas filling stations built around the state. Natural gas, he maintains, is "probably going to be our bridge off foreign oil," but you can’t get anywhere without the retail infrastructure.

Michael Koska is a good example of what you get when a regular citizen not only gets worked up about an issue, but goes out of his way to get informed and try to do something about it. That’s why we endorsed him in the spring. Of course, we also endorsed his general election opponent, so that makes this race particularly interesting to us.

DeMint sticks up for Sarah Palin

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If you’re a Republican looking for cred on Iraq, then you want Lindsey Graham to stand up and tell everybody you were for the "surge" when nobody else was — as Lindsey did for best buddy John McCain last week.

But if you’re looking to bolster your rep as a fiscal hawk, then you want South Carolina’s junior senator.

Jim DeMint has made a name for himself nationally as the scourge of earmarks. So it is that Sarah Palin’s got to be grateful for his op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning, headlined "Yes, Palin Did Stop That Bridge." An excerpt:

In politics, words are cheap. What really counts are actions. Democrats and Republicans have talked about fiscal responsibility for years. In reality, both parties have a shameful record of wasting hundreds of billions of tax dollars on pork-barrel projects.

My Senate colleague Barack Obama is now attacking Gov. Sarah Palin over earmarks. Having worked with both John McCain and Mr. Obama on earmarks, and as a recovering earmarker myself, I can tell you that Mrs. Palin’s leadership and record of reform stands well above that of Mr. Obama.

Apparently, some people watched a football game last night instead (I’ll bet they’re sorry)

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Actually, I said pretty much everything I had to say about this in my headline, which came to me when someone dropped by my breakfast table this morning and said, "Did you watch that game?" I muttered something about having had work to do, then when he went away, I quickly scanned through the sections of the paper scattered on my table looking for information on said game, so I would not be caught out by the next person to assume I knew all about it.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, the Chickens played Vanderbilt, and lost. (You may wonder how in the world I could have read any of the paper without knowing any of that, and all I can say is that for me, it’s easy. Items about football, no matter how prominently displayed, seem in my case to be protected by a Somebody Else’s Problem field, and are therefore invisible, unless I go looking for them.)

Only one more thing to say: Who were the scheduling wizards who decided to have USC’s first two games, not only on Thursday nights, but on the Thursday nights that the men who would be president gave their respective convention acceptance speeches? Are we truly living in parallel universes, and does the Leadership of the Free World matter as little to people over in that other world as the outcome of a football game does to me?

Let’s hope not, because I have a creepy feeling that a lot of folks who were glued to the games instead of the speeches are going to end up voting in November, and that’s just scary.

Austin on right track: Tap private sector for lights

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First, I am no Scrooge, any more than is our friend James D. McCallister. While I might be some decades removed from the time of life when Christmas was pure joy, unalloyed by stress and hassle, I am not one to call the season a "humbug." I need no spirit from the past to startle me into remembering the excitement I felt as a child when downtown decorations went up.

But as I think back to the various cities and towns in which my memory’s eye sees those simple wreaths and lights hung from lampposts, I associate those things with local merchants. And so it is that I praise City Manager Charles Austin for suggesting that perhaps it is NOT the job of the city’s taxpayers to come up with $140,800 to put up holiday lights and decorations in downtown Columbia.

"There are other ways to do this besides the city," says Mr. Austin. Indeed.

Of course, the sorts of merchants with whom you might expect to collaborate on such a thing — the kind that most clearly benefit from the Christmas season (say, Macy’s or Belk) — are rather thin on the ground these days, and in some cases perhaps for the same reason that new lights are needed (the disruption caused by streetscaping).

But before the city government coughs up even such a small amount for decorations, it needs to figure out how to pay for an improved bus system, and deal properly with homelessness. What good are festive lights if they illuminate a human being sleeping on a grate?

How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?

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Cindi wrote a short editorial for tomorrow about the latest way that our state has found to waste "Competitive Grant" money. In case you haven’t read about it, Rep. Liston Barfield got 100 Gs to entertain German visitors to the Grand Strand, even though some local tourism officials said the money would have been better spent on advertising to promote tourism.

Wanting to jazz up the headline a bit, I sent her an instant message asking, "How do you say ‘So Gay’ in German?"

So far, she hasn’t replied. Maybe Herb can help us with that.

SLED’s antique helo

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Sometimes on the edit page, we get into a bit of a rut. There are so many ways in which our inadequate state government is underfunded that for simplicity’s sake we tend to fall back on certain standbys when we gripe about our Legislature’s failure to set priorities in budgeting. When we cite a litany of neglect, we usually fall on:

  • Mental Health — A favorite example is how the lack of state resources for the mentally ill unnecessarily overcrowd our jails and hospital emergency rooms.
  • Prisons — We keep locking up more and more people, and providing less and less resources even to guard, much less rehabilitate, them.
  • Highways — We let them crumble, and we don’t enforce speed limits or other laws.
  • Schools — Too many districts, no follow-through on the promise to do more in early childhood, the neglect of the most troubled and impoverished rural districts, etc.

And that’s a nice overview, as far as it goes. It’s fine for just a representation in passing of the overall problem. We refer to such examples when we’re complaining about everything from poorly considered tax cuts to spending on things the state doesn’t need to spend on.

But we could write about other examples as well, and probably should more often. I was reminded of this by new SLED Chief Reggie Lloyd when he spoke to the Columbia Rotary yesterday. He talked about how everywhere he’s been in either state or federal government, he always seemed to arrive just as the budget screws were being applied.

The wiretaps he spoke of, and which were cited in the brief in today’s paper, were related to this. SLED has the equipment and the authority to do wiretaps in drug and gang investigations. But the people haven’t been trained in how to do it, so the equipment has sat there (to the delight of libertarians, no doubt, but not to those of us who love Big Brother).

But my favorite anecdote was when he was talking about the department’s Huey. When I heard that, I thought maybe I heard wrong: They’re still flying a Huey? But that wasn’t the half of it. This particular Huey was salvaged from the rice paddy it once crashed into in Vietnam. Now, it’s being flown by pilots who weren’t yet born then. Not long ago, SLED did some sort of joint thing with some folks from the Coast Guard, and they all wanted to see the Huey. They had heard about it, but found it hard to believe.

Hamburgerhill

However we pay for it, we all need a better transit system

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

On Wednesday, my truck was in the shop. This sort of situation may mean slightly different things to different people. Here’s what it meant to me:

Wednesday morning, I needed a way to get from home — out west of West Columbia — to work, if for no other reason than I needed the paycheck to pay for getting my truck fixed.

Fortunately, my eldest daughter was staying at our house with her children — her husband is remodeling their home — and she works downtown. So she drove me way south of downtown to my office, before turning around and going back to her office.

(My wife couldn’t take me because she had my daughter’s six-month-old twins, and her car isn’t set up to accommodate the Apollo-capsule-type arrangements that they call baby carseats these days.)

From that point, I was stuck. I knew I was going to have to stay late at the office that night — later than anyone in my department — because I was going to be off Friday and needed to get at least a week’s worth of work done in the four days available. Besides, no one in my department lives anywhere near me. In fact, I started writing this column on Wednesday to get ahead, and as I typed this sentence at 5:23 p.m., I had no idea how I’d get home.

As it happened, my daughter got me at 8 p.m. Fortunately, she and her children had to go back into town anyway; otherwise picking me up would have involved a long round trip for somebody, with gasoline at $4 a gallon. I wasn’t quite at a stopping place when she arrived, so she waited downstairs for me with, as near as I could tell over her cell phone, at least one of the twins screaming.

Then, on Thursday morning, my truck still wasn’t ready. So we improvised a whole new plan, in which I drove my wife’s car into town, and my daughter left work at midday to take her car out to my wife so that she could go to work in the afternoon. But at least I was covered in case the job required me to be somewhere else in the course of the day, which sometimes happens.

This is ridiculous, folks.

Yes, I know: Poor me. These are decidedly spoiled American, middle-class problems.

But never mind me. The truth is, if you are less fortunate, you have a harder time owning a vehicle, fixing it when it’s broken, filling it with gasoline, or paying to park it. Nor can you afford to do without that job that the vehicle would take you to.

There are many places in this country where folks don’t have these problems. I have a New York subway card in my wallet from my last trip there, which I can’t bring myself to throw away because of the wonderful thing it represents: freedom from driving and pumping gas and finding a place to park, simply ducking down a few steps, and moments later finding myself in whatever part of town that I need to be in.

In the Columbia metropolitan area, we have our own sort of mass transit system, in theory. But it isn’t fully adequate to anyone’s needs. It doesn’t go from enough places to enough places often enough, and it’s tough for someone who just needs it occasionally to find out quickly and easily how to use it.

What we need is a better transit system, but what we’re in danger of having now is a worse one, or none at all. That’s because Richland County — the one local government that’s done the most to step up to the challenge of funding said system — is going to stop stepping up in October. That’s when the vehicle tax the county levied for that purpose runs out.

Last week, the County Council ditched a plan to hold a referendum asking voters to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the buses and other transportation needs and wants. I don’t blame the council. As we said in an editorial before the action, the Legislature has jacked up our sales taxes too high already. And besides, some of the things in that transportation proposal were more wants than needs, and only in there to get people who don’t ride buses to back the proposal.

No one knows where we go from here. The County Council doesn’t know. The citizens group that put together the plan the council rejected doesn’t know.

And just in case we got the notion that the city of Columbia would be taking up the slack, I got a preemptive call from Mayor Bob Coble Thursday morning to tell me that the options range from few to none. (While the mayor didn’t say so, that’s largely thanks to the Legislature’s tireless efforts to make sure local governments can’t pay for any local need that they aren’t paying for already.)

About the only person offering new ideas last week was regular contributor “bud” on my blog, who suggested using the city’s and county’s shares of the “hospitality tax,” a lot of which currently goes for things a whole lot less essential than a mass transit system.

As I write this, I don’t know what the best way to pay for a better transit system might be. What I do know is that Midlands governments need to find a way, for the sake of:

  • Those who have no other way to get to work now.
  • Those of us who would like a better way to work than we have now (and sometimes need one).
  • Those “knowledge workers” who are supposed to make the planned Innovista work, and who have the option of working instead in a community where it’s easier, and cheaper, and cleaner to get around.

For more, visit my blog at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Do YOU feel sufficiently stimulated? ’Cause I don’t…

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
WHAT DID you do with your “economic stimulus” check from the government? Did you spend it in a suitably patriotic manner, doing your bit to kick-start the good ol’ U.S. economy?
    You did? Are you sure? I just ask because, as a member of the U.S. economy, I’m feeling a little understimulated.
    But then, I always had doubts about the whole scheme.
    Sort of like with the government’s bailout of Bear Stearns. I’m not a libertarian, not by a long shot, but sometimes I break out with little itchy spots of libertarianism, and one of those itchy spots causes me to ask, Why am I, as a taxpaying member of the U.S. economy, bailing out something called Bear Stearns? I didn’t even know what it was. Even after I’d read about it in The Wall Street Journal, I still could not answer the fundamental question, “If you work at Bear Stearns, what is it that you do all day?” I understand what a fireman does, and if the fire department were about to go under, I’d be one of the first to step forward and say let’s bail it out. Of course, if the fire department wanted me to lend it $29 billion, with a “B,” I might have further questions. Yet that’s what we’ve done for Bear Stearns.
    Apparently Bear Stearns is a financial institution that the federal government considers “too big to fail,” which makes me wonder, if it’s too big to fail, then why does it need to be bailed out?
    But things like this always perplex me. I am not an economist, nor a financial expert, which I’m told is different. Nor am I any kind of a businessman. At my house, I am not allowed to try to balance the checkbook.
    Anyway, while I’m still pondering why you and I and the guy down the street lent $29 billion to bail out this Bear Stearns, along comes Congress and the president wanting to send somewhat more modest checks to you and me and that same guy.
    I’m all for Democrats and Republicans setting aside pointless bickering to do something for the good of the country, but when the economy’s going into the tank, and the Democratic Congress and the Republican president are racing to see which of them can send us the biggest check, sort of like the Three Stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time, I begin to have doubts.
    I start to think, “With the national debt at — wait a sec while I go check the Internet — 9 trillion dollars, and climbing at a rate of more than a Bear Stearns bailout every month, the government is going to send several hundred dollars to every household in the country?”
    It seems that everybody in Washington was acting along the same lines of reasoning as when, in response to attacks upon this country more deadly than Pearl Harbor, we were told to go out and shop, instead of buying bonds or rationing gas or something that would have made sense to an earlier generation. And now, six-and a half years into the War on Terror, some of us weren’t shopping hard enough. So to help us get back into the fight, the government decided to send us all some more ammunition.
    As it got closer to time for me to get my ammo, my martial spirits rose, and I started thinking this was a better and better idea. If my country needed me to shop, I was going to make sure every shot counted. So I did some research.
    Finally, a suitable target presented itself. Week before last, we all went to Memphis for a wedding. The wife and I stayed with Mary, one of her best friends from high school.
    My wife has always held Mary up as one of the smartest in her class — not only a scholar, but a woman of great good sense and practicality. Mary had recently earned some extra money, and had spent it on a 42-inch, 1080-resolution flat-panel HDTV set. It had cost her $800 at Sam’s Club. I studied this item very closely while we were there, flicking back and forth between ball games on the HD channels and the same ball games on mere mortal channels, and came to the inescapable conclusion that Mary was indeed the smartest in her class, and had made an excellent investment — way better than the Bear Stearns thing.
    So by the time we got back from Memphis, I was all in a sweat to get that stimulus check, which would amount to $1,200.
    But when it came, do you know what we spent it on? A hospital bill. Not a hospital bill for major surgery or life-saving emergency treatment, because none of us had needed that, thank God. No, this was for a few X-rays for my daughter’s sprained ankle — for my baby, who was temporarily off my insurance but was covered by a separate policy that we were paying $117 a month for, which seemed like a really good deal until she needed some actual routine medical care.
    When you have five kids between the ages of 19 and 31 in the United States of America, you spend a lot of time holding your breath until they get safe jobs with their own group medical insurance. Two of mine have achieved that status, and both know they’d better not try to actually stimulate the economy by starting their own businesses or anything, because their Dad would have a stroke.
    All of this gets me to thinking… If Congress really and truly wants to help the U.S. economy, maybe, just maybe, it should pass a National Health Plan along the lines of practically every other developed nation on the planet, instead of sending me a check that would barely cover two months worth of premiums on health insurance for my wife and me and only one of my children.
    So Congress, I appreciate the thought, but I’ve got to tell you: Sending me $1,200 to throw into a debt hole that I wouldn’t have if I lived in any other industrialized country just doesn’t cut it.

Get stimulated at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

What if such energy were used for Good?

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Rovekarl

Karl Rove had an op-ed piece in the WSJ today (he writes for them a lot these days) expressing grudging respect for the "brilliant ground game" Barack Obama’s put together. For Democrats, of course, this is like receiving an admiring nod from The Devil Himself, especially since the Atwater cohort is saying that Obama is using his — Karl Rove‘s — ideas. An excerpt:

    For starters, Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote….
    Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.
    The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP’s "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help….

All of which emphasized two points: First, people like Karl Rove think this is a "Game," and therefore alternate hitting the opposition as hard as they can with sportsmanlike expressions of admiration when the other side scores a good hit. (Subtext: I’m a professional, not one of this "true-believer" losers.) It’s not about trying to accomplish something for the country; it’s about playing hard and winning.

Second, it makes me think: Why can’t this kind of energy be devoted to accomplishing some good for the country after the hoopla of elections is over? What if we were to enlist millions of motivated and dedicated volunteers to push with all their might for National Health care, or a solution to the coming Social Security crash, or an honest-to-goodness Energy Policy that would improve our economy, our strategic position and the health of the planet?

Or, to think of it another way, what if Mr. Bush, after winning that 2004 election, had put enough boots on the ground in Iraq (the comparison to the army Rove assembled seems apt) to nip the insurgency in its bud, long before he finally agreed to the Surge?

All the money, and all the effort that goes into political campaigns… what a waste, unless an equal or greater effort is mounted after the campaign to accomplish something in office.

But that’s not the way the Game is played, is it?

Jim Clyburn begs to differ on earmarks

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Today’s op-ed piece by Jim Clyburn is one of those responses that make it hard to recognize the original piece to which they are "responding." In this case, a lot of that is a result of the personality and political style of the man whose name appears on the piece. I invite you to go read the original editorial.

Mr. Clyburn asserts that The State "doesn’t understand" earmarks, but doesn’t support that. In fact, it’s hard to square this assertion in his piece:

 The State editors’ position on earmarking is based on erroneous
reporting, a lack of knowledge of the facts and a disregard for the
constitutional authority granted to Congress to have power over the
purse. I have always said and will reiterate here that my personal
agenda is to improve the quality of life for the residents of the 6th
Congressional District.

… with this passage from ours:

Mr. Clyburn did not invent congressional earmarks — a point his critics
too often overlook. They are no doubt as old as our federal budgeting
process, and their largest growth spurt came while Republicans
controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency. In a perverse way,
the fact that he is the most successful earmarker in the S.C.
delegation speaks to his clout. And it’s hard to argue when he says he
is serving the best interests of his constituents by pumping federal money into a district that was drawn to include our state’s poorest areas.

Indeed, our editorial was less about Mr. Clyburn and his particular earmarks, and more about the fact that such a system exists.

To find our real area of disagreement, look to the headlines. The one on our editorial is "Clyburn earmarks a microcosm of broken system." The one on the op-ed is "Earmarks serve the public good." And once he gets past his inaccurate complaints about what we said, he gets to the core of the issue, which is that he believes the proper way to appropriate federal funds for infrastructure and the like is via the interested guidance of influential members of Congress, not "unqualified political appointees," which I suppose is the Democratic moral equivalent of the nonpolitical "bureaucrats" that Republicans gripe about. (If all else fails, Blame Bush.)

Finally, I must take issue with the assertion that “if programs that get funded through earmarks were strong enough to stand on their merits, there would be no need for the local congressman to stick a note in the budget demanding that they be funded.” Let’s take a recent Washington Post report that illustrates what happened last fiscal year when there was a moratorium on earmarks.

In the absence of congressional action, funds in the Transportation Department’s discretionary budget were allocated by unqualified political appointees at the department — with no background or experience in public transportation — who chose to spend nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money on toll road experiments in urban cities. All the money was spent on seven projects in five states, not including South Carolina.

No money returned to the national treasury. No investments in rural communities. No investments in mass transit. No equity or fairness. It was a case of the triumph of ideology over the public good. The year before, thanks to earmarks, the same pot of money was spent on 442 grants in 47 states, and this year it is being spent on 313 projects in 43 states — and South Carolina has benefited from these funds.

We disagree. Mr. Clyburn sets up a false choice — either the old way of doing things (disbursement by political influence, which benefits the district of a guy who now has loads of such influence), or wicked Bush Administration privatization schemes. (At least, that seems to be the case. I’m assuming here that the WashPost piece to which he refers is the March 17 one headlined "Letting the Market Drive Transportation; Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization." That seems to fit his description.)

The proper way to select priorities for spending transportation funds is to let the NONpolitical professionals — i.e., "bureaucrats" — choose the specific projects most needed across the nation, according to overall criteria established by the Congress. Or don’t spend the money at all.

South Carolina has had a century of trying it the Clyburn way — Mendel Rivers, for instance, was no slouch at throwing federal largesse in the Palmetto State’s direction — and we’re still poor, still lagging behind the rest of the nation. Mr. Clyburn believes his approach is different in that it directs the money to previously neglected areas and constituencies, and it is. But that doesn’t make his the best way for Congress to set federal spending priorities.

Demise of the Executive Institute

18 Replies

Here’s a veto that I missed last week. I guess I should have noticed it, since it was one of those rare ones that the Legislature actually sustained:

I am very sorry to have to report to you that funding for the Executive Institute was vetoed by the Governor and the veto was sustained by the House of Representatives.  Therefore the Institute will not begin it’s 19th year in August as planned and we will shut down the operation at the end of this fiscal year.

I would like to thank all of you for the friendship, enthusiasm and support you have shown us over the years.  You are the major reason for the success we have had.  Thanks so much for 18 great years. 

Tina

Tina Joseph Hatchell
Director
Executive Institute

Alongside such biggies as the SCHIP program and indigent defense, this one was easy to overlook. But now that I know, I’m sorry to hear it.

I’m an alumnus of the Executive Institute, class of ’94. Back then, the director of the program was Phil Grose. That was thee year that I was getting ready to come up to the editorial department from news (end of ’93, beginning of ’94). My predecessor Tom McLean paid for me to do the program, because back in those days, we had money for such professional development. Primarily, the Institute existed to train up-and-coming managers in state government, although there was always a smattering of private sector folks for leavening — which helped give the government types exposure to the private sector, and vice versa. The interaction itself was educational.

It was particularly useful because of the Institute’s teaching method. It was run in conjunction with the Kennedy School at Harvard, and the instructors led the class through real-life case studies, in which we were asked to put ourselves in the places of the public administrators who had navigated their way through a variety of crises and challenges.

Being the newspaper guy, I had to overcome a great deal of distrust and wariness on the part of my classmates, which was essential to the kind of interaction that the classes called for. Middle managers in government see press types as natural enemies, for a simple reason: Newspapers don’t write about what they do except when there is a problem, consequently we help create the phenomenon we see in the comments on this blog — a lot of folks in the electorate who only see them in terms of the worst mistakes that anyone like them has ever made, because that’s what gets written about.

But we managed to get a good enough rapport going to have some pretty good discussions going. Frequently, my role was to try to convince people that having the problem (in the case study) get into the newspapers was not the end of the world. It was interesting, and I think helpful to having a better-run state government.

Does that mean I think lawmakers should have overridden the veto. No, not if they were going to leave the prisons, mental health, our roads and 4K all underfunded. But if they were going to override either this or their pet "Competitive" Grants Program, they should have overridden this.

So guess which one they overrode — "overwhelmingly"?

Marking time at the State House

6 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
IN THE LAST 15 minutes of the 2008 session of the S.C. General Assembly, there were three things going on in the House chamber: The speaker and clerks and others up on the podium were fussing about finishing important paperwork of some sort. All of the other House members were wandering about on the floor, socializing, saying goodbye, slapping backs, shaking hands, sharing stories and so forth.
    All, that is, but two members, Reps. Chris Hart and Walt McLeod. Mr. Hart was at the lectern. Mr. McLeod was at his desk. Their microphoned voices rose indistinctly above the buzz of their milling, meandering colleagues. A sample of their vaudevillian dialogue:

Rep. McLEOD: Is it correct to say that, at the present time, our state prison system is operating at a deficit?
Rep. HART: That’s absolutely correct, and I’m glad you mentioned that, Mr. McLeod…

    They were discussing a two-part proposal made by Attorney General Henry McMaster earlier in the session. He had proposed to do away with what’s left of parole in our state prisons, while simultaneously creating a new “middle court” that would punish first-time, nonviolent wrongdoers in ways other than sending them to prison.
    What Messrs. McLeod and Hart were teaming up to say — between Mr. McLeod’s friendly, leading questions and Mr. Hart’s “thank you for that good question” answers — was that it would be crazy to do the former without first doing the latter. (Their language was more polite; I’m just cutting to the chase.)
    That’s because, as Mr. Hart explained, South Carolina already did away with parole for violent offenders long ago. And since then, we’ve been jamming more and more prisoners (violent and nonviolent) into our prisons, while cutting the budget of the Corrections Department year after year. We now spend less per prisoner than any other state in the union, while locking up more of our population than most. We lock up more prisoners with fewer guards, and make basically no effort to rehabilitate them. So our prisons are increasingly dangerous places — for the guards, for the prisoners and for those of us on the outside who depend on the worst criminals staying inside.
    Some of you will say, Oh, isn’t that just like a couple of liberal Democrats, prattling on about mollycoddling prisoners. If you say that, you’re not paying attention.
    One of Gov. Mark Sanford’s biggest gripes about the budget the Legislature just passed — and remember, this is Mark Sanford, the most fanatical enemy of “growing government” ever to enter the State House — was that it does not spend enough to run our prisons safely and responsibly.
    He is guided in this by his hyper-conservative director of Corrections, Jon Ozmint. (I once toured a prison with Mr. Ozmint, a former prosecutor. He kept striking up chats with the prisoners. He’d ask, “Who sent you here?” The prisoner would name a judge. Mr. Ozmint would say, “Oh, Judge So-and-So! He’s a really good judge! He’s really fair, isn’t he?” The prisoner would gape at Mr. Ozmint as though he were a Martian.) Mr. Ozmint, after years of refusing to complain on the record, wrote an op-ed piece this year to beg lawmakers not to abolish parole, suggesting that if they did, he and his shrunken staff would not be able to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker.
    Everybody who is familiar with these facts knows these things. Henry McMaster knows these things. So why did he propose something that flew in the face of the facts (abolishing parole), at the same time as proposing something that made perfect sense in light of the same facts (alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders, to reserve prison space for the worst criminals)?
    Because he is a political realist. He knows the South Carolina General Assembly. “No parole” was the tooth-rotting sweetener to help the alternative-sentencing medicine go down.
    The good news here is that the Legislature didn’t abolish parole this year. The bad news is that it didn’t provide for alternative sentencing, either. What it did, in the end, was neglect the whole problem as usual, sending more people behind bars while we pay less and less to keep them there.
    It was the same approach lawmakers took to early-childhood education; our crumbling, unsafe roads; our emergency rooms crammed with mental patients; our struggling rural schools — leave it all to fester.
    What did lawmakers do this year besides throw up their hands over the lack of money, after having cut taxes by about a billion dollars over the last few sessions? Well, they passed an “immigration reform” bill that will accomplish two things: force businesses to do a lot of paperwork, and enable lawmakers to tell the voters in this election year that they had “done something” about illegal immigration. And boy did they spend a lot of time and energy on that.
    Back to Mr. Hart and Mr. McLeod. If the whole abolish parole/alternative sentencing thing was already dead for the year, why were they going on so earnestly? Well, they’re just that way; they’re very earnest guys. It was pointless, really — perhaps even a bit priggish of them. They knew they were just marking time and so did everybody else, so you can’t blame anybody for ignoring them. It was just political theater; they were actors in a play with a “what if?” plot, as in, “What if lawmakers realistically and intelligently engaged the actual challenges facing their state?”
    Only an easily distracted fool who didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on would have paid attention to them at all.

See the video of Hart and McLeod here.

Guys at the Bada-Bing must LOVE S.C. lawmakers

11 Replies

Pork_store

As part of my never-ending quest to be fair-minded and see the silver lining, I’ve managed to think of one group of citizens who will benefit from, and have reason to appreciate, the otherwise contemptible, ridiculous failure of the S.C. House to override Mark Sanford’s veto of the cigarette tax increase. They’re not citizens of S.C. (and come to think of it, Furio’s not even a citizen of this country), but let’s not get picky.

In case you haven’t done the math on this, the S.C. tax on cigarettes is 7 cents (yes, 7 cents) a pack. In New York City, it’s $4.25 a pack. Imagine the profit on a truckload of cartons, even if you don’t steal the truck. As if I-95 needed MORE traffic…

The Wall Street Journal recently explained the profitability to O.C. of the New York taxes. Of course, being the WSJ — the only publication in the world that actually believes Mark Sanford is a contender for John McCain’s running mate (and even then it’s just the ideologues on the editorial board) — was arguing that the N.Y. tax was a bad thing.

    While the problem first surfaced during the Great
Depression, tax hikes in the early 1960s created a major profit
opportunity for smugglers and kicked the epidemic into high gear. By
1967, a quarter of the cigarettes consumed in the Empire State were
bootlegged. New York City’s finance administrator labeled cigarette
smuggling the "principal stoking facility of the engine of organized
crime."

    Crime rapidly spread beyond New York’s borders, as
trucks carrying cigarettes across the country were hijacked and
businesses selling them robbed to supply New York’s black market. In
1972, the chairman of a New York commission told Congress that
retailers and other workers were "confronted almost daily with the risk
and dangers of personal violence which are now inherent in their
industry."

But from a South Carolina perspective, what that math says is that we could stop that traffic from coming out of our state — but only if we were willing to raise the tax by several times the lousy 50 cents we were talking about. But being South Carolina, and having our Legislature and our governor, we couldn’t even manage that, which is of course beneath pitiful.

I should add that the WSJ piece also dealt with the connection between cigarette smuggling and terrorism. But thanks to South Carolina, ordinary decent American criminals are in a position to keep competing with the foreign bad guys.

How they voted on cigarette tax

26 Replies

Trying to catch up with messages and such, I have no time to comment right now on the inexcusable, unconscionable, reprehensible vote to uphold Gov. Mark Sanford’s indefensible veto of the cigarette tax (beyond reminding you of what I’ve said over and over — how the money is spent is secondary, far secondary, to cutting teen smoking by raising the price, and there was NO excuse not to do that). But until I DO have time, here’s how those no-account cusses (and the rest of them) voted:

{BC-SC-XGR-Cigarette Tax-Roll Call,0405}
{Cigarette Tax-Roll Call}
{By The Associated Press}=
   The 54-57 roll call by which the South Carolina House voted to sustain a veto on a 50 cent-a-pack cigarette tax increase. A two-thirds vote was required to override the veto.
   On this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote to override the veto and "no" vote was a vote to sustain the veto.
   Voting "yes" were 40 Democrats and 14 Republicans.
   Voting "no" were 4 Democrats and 53 Republicans.
   Not voting were 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans.

{Democrats Voting Yes}
   Alexander, Florence; Allen, Greenville; Anderson, Georgetown; Anthony, Union; Bales, Eastover; Bowers, Brunson; Branham, Lake City; Brantley, Ridgeland; Breeland, Charleston; G. Brown, Bishopville; R. Brown, Hollywood; Clyburn, Aiken; Cobb-Hunter, Orangeburg; Funderburk, Camden; Govan, Orangeburg; Hart, Columbia; Harvin, Summerton; Hodges, Green Pond; Howard, Columbia; Jefferson, Pineville; Jennings, Bennettsville; Kennedy, Greeleyville; Knight, St. George; Mack, North Charleston; McLeod, Little Mountain; Miller, Pawleys Island; Mitchell, Spartanburg; J.H. Neal, Hopkins; J.M. Neal, Kershaw; Ott, St. Matthews; Parks, Greenwood; Rutherford, Columbia; Scott, Columbia; Sellers, Denmark; F.N. Smith, Greenville; J.E. Smith, Columbia; Stavrinakis, Charleston; Vick, Chesterfield; Weeks, Sumter; Williams, Darlington;

{Republicans Voting Yes}
   Ballentine, Irmo; Cotty, Columbia; Crawford, Florence; Dantzler, Goose Creek; Gullick, Lake Wylie; Hiott, Pickens; Huggins, Columbia; Mahaffey, Lyman; Owens, Pickens; Pinson, Greenwood; Rice, Easley; Scarborough, Charleston; Skelton, Six Mile; Whitmire, Walhalla;

{Democrats Voting No}
   Battle, Nichols; Kirsh, Clover; Moss, Gaffney; Neilson, Darlington;

{Republicans Voting No}
   Bannister, Greenville; Barfield, Conway; Bedingfield, Mauldin; Bingham, West Columbia; Bowen, Anderson; Brady, Columbia; Cato, Travelers Rest; Chalk, Hilton Head Island; Clemmons, Myrtle Beach; Cooper, Piedmont; Daning, Goose Creek; Delleney, Chester; Duncan, Clinton; Edge, North Myrtle Beach; Erickson, Beaufort; Frye, Batesburg-Leesville; Gambrell, Honea Path; Hagood, Mt. Pleasant; Haley, Lexington; Hamilton, Taylors; Hardwick, Surfside Beach; Harrell, Charleston; Harrison, Columbia; Haskins, Greenville; Herbkersman, Bluffton; Kelly, Woodruff; Leach, Greer; Littlejohn, Spartanburg; Loftis, Greenville; Lowe, Florence; Lucas, Hartsville; Merrill, Daniel Island; Mulvaney, Indian Land; Perry, Aiken; E.H. Pitts, Lexington; M.A. Pitts, Laurens; Sandifer, Seneca; Shoopman, Greer; Simrill, Rock Hill; D.C. Smith, North Augusta; G.M. Smith, Sumter; G.R. Smith, Simpsonville; J.R. Smith, Langley; Stewart, Aiken; Talley, Spartanburg; Taylor, Laurens; Thompson, Anderson; Toole, West Columbia; Umphlett, Moncks Corner; Walker, Landrum; White, Anderson; Witherspoon, Conway; Young, Summerville;

{Those Not Voting}
   Democrats: Agnew, Abbeville; Coleman, Winnsboro; Hayes, Hamer; Hosey, Barnwell; Moody-Lawrence, Rock Hill; Phillips, Gaffney; Whipper, North Charleston;
   Republicans: Davenport, Boiling Springs; Hutson, Summerville; Limehouse, Charleston; W.D. Smith, Spartanburg; Spires, Pelion; Viers, Myrtle Beach;

You might think I should praise those who voted to override, but I won’t — anyone, regardless of political philosophy, should do what they did. To vote to sustain the veto was beneath contempt.

How they voted on the cigarette tax

11 Replies

Here’s the Senate vote to pass H.3567, which increases cigarette taxes by 50 cents per pack, with half the revenue going to expand Medicaid coverage, and half to give tax credits to low-income workers to help them purchase medical insurance.

Passage of the bill (H.3567):
Ayes 33; Nays 11; Abstain 1

AYES
Alexander          Anderson               Ceips
Cleary               Cromer                  Drummond
Elliott                Fair                       Ford
Gregory             Hayes                    Hutto
Jackson             Knotts                   Land *
Leatherman       Leventis                Lourie
Malloy               Martin                   Matthews
McGill                O’Dell                    Patterson *
Pinckney            Rankin                  Reese
Scott                 Setzler                  Sheheen *
Short                 Thoma                  Williams
Total–33

NAYS
Campsen            Courson                Grooms
Hawkins             Massey                 McConnell
Peeler                Ritchie                  Ryberg
Vaughn               Verdin
Total–11

ABSTAIN
Bryant
Total–1

*These Senators were not present in the Chamber at the time the vote was taken and the votes were recorded by leave of the Senate, with unanimous consent.

Cindi, whom we can thank for looking up the above while I was in yet another candidate interview, says other votes that might interest you would include:
1. Amendment P-1, to raise the cigarette tax by $1; tabled 31-13
2. Amendment P-4a, remove the provision that automatically increases
the tax each year by the rate of medical inflation. The Senate refused
to table that amendment 24-18, and then passed it on a voice vote.
Senators who voted "aye" voted to eliminate the inflation index.
    These votes can be found in the Senate Journals of May 7 (P-1) and May 8 (P-4a). Go to http://www.scstatehouse.net/html-pages/sjournal.htm to find the Journals, and then search for the amendments.)