President's Letters

Best and Worst Ideas of 2009

Ashley Landess
July 2009

Part of our job is to keep you informed of important South Carolina events. You will soon be receiving a copy of our inaugural publication recapping the best and worst ideas of the 2009 legislative session. This annual product is a special bonus for our members to put complex legislation in context and give you an inside perspective on what legislators are discussing.

The publication is also a preview of next year’s session since many of these ideas – more bad than good – will be revived. In short, this is not a list of legislative minutiae or a rating of bills, but a guide to the current direction of state government. The economic downturn and resulting budget debate dominated the 2009 session. Fierce debate over the federal stimulus package and arguments to cut spending instead of accepting bailouts occupied most legislative time. In fact, just 121 bills were passed this year as compared to an average of 250 for the prior two years. The economy, however, was not the whole story of 2009.

In Memory of Hal Eberle

Ashley Landess
June 2009

We were all very saddened at the loss of Hal Eberle, the Policy Council’s first president and a board member for more than 20 years. Hal put the Policy Council on the map when he issued a scorecard of lawmakers’ voting records on conservative issues, which he compiled himself. The scorecard went a long way toward holding legislators accountable, a cornerstone of the representative democracy that Hal Eberle dedicated much of his life to preserving.

Hal believed in taking principled stands and sticking with them, and he was an inspiration to all of us who worked with him. Hal’s old friend Joe Wilson gave a wonderful tribute to him in the U.S. House of Representatives, which appeared in the Congressional Quarterly. No one could do a better job of Congressman Wilson, and we are all grateful for his fine remarks.

We are honored to share them with you.

SC Government Bigger, More Intrusive, Dependent of Federal Dollars

Ashley Landess
May 2009

The General Assembly just passed the second-largest budget in state history and made South Carolina’s government bigger, more intrusive and so dependent upon federal dollars that more than a third of South Carolina’s government is controlled out of Washington.

In addition, for the first time in at least three decades the House and Senate passed their budget without a conference committee to iron out differences. Legislative leaders in both bodies spoke as one voice when they committed almost a billion dollars in annualizations (one-time money for recurring programs), grabbed more power from the already-weak executive branch and took capital from taxpayers and businesses to dole it out to select companies and industries.

Despite opposition from a small but vocal minority of taxpayer advocates in the legislature, lawmakers spent more than a billion dollars in one-time federal stimulus money, a decision economist Art Laffer says will cost South Carolina as many as 35,000 jobs. Lawmakers ignored the economists –even worse, they ignored the citizens.