TheState.com: Cindi Scoppe

Oh deer! Are they wasting time again?

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:13 EDT

I’M PRETTY good at staying on task, but an efficiency expert would find plenty of examples of inefficiency — what most of us would call “wasting time.”

I’ll stop writing mid-sentence to check that e-mail that just pinged. I’ll walk down the hall to pick up a print-out I won’t need to look at for hours. I’ll make a special trip to a colleague’s office just to tell her about my latest experiments in baking. (The Dobos tort will not be repeated.) Another trip to respond in person rather than by computer to a colleague’s joke.

Sometimes I am wasting time — stalling because I just don’t feel like getting started on that next editorial.

More often, I’m giving my brain the breathing room it needs to get started on that next editorial, or to find that just-right word or that ending that ties it all together. It’s a magical process. I often can’t make it the full 40 steps to the printer before the idea hits; I pirouette and race back to my computer and type away until the entire column is written.

Even my workouts — perhaps especially my workouts — produce that little creative spark that staring at a computer screen can stifle. Rare is the week that I don’t write much of an editorial in my head — or identify the topic, the approach and the specific language for my next column — while I burn off calories.

A chance to break out of one step forward, one step back mode

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:49 EDT

THE LAST time the Legislature “reformed” our campaign finance law, a lot of good changes were supposed to have been passed, to make it easier for voters to figure out to whom their elected officials might be indebting themselves.

As the years went by, though, it became clear that the changes that got talked about the most didn’t quite get made. And some of the not-so-good changes didn’t get talked about very much.

And of course, a whole slew of changes that needed to be made weren’t — but we’ve known that all along.

I bring all this up because in recent weeks the Senate has passed not one, not two, but three bills that would make changes to that last reform. And one of them is actually a good change.

There’s still no movement on the biggest one that got away in 2003: the anti-video poker law, which legislators assured us would require any special interests that spend money to try to influence our votes to tell us where their money came from and where they spent it. As it turned out, an extra “not” mysteriously appeared in the final version of the bill, and so legislators only required special interests to tell us where they spent the money — not where it came from. And some special interests refuse to do even that, but that’s a different story. That loophole remains gaping five years later because legislators are terrified of the special interests that most like to exploit it (that’s voucher proponents this time around, instead of video poker barons).

Beating May 1 deadline is only part of the battle for late bills

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:14 EDT

FOR ALL the extra hours the House and Senate stay in session during the final days of April, for all the gyrations lawmakers go through to get their bills over to the other body to beat the May 1 “crossover” deadline, the fact is that even the bills that slide in under that deadline have little chance of becoming law.

There are exceptions, of course, primarily when that under-the-deadline passage is the result of opposing sides suddenly reaching a compromise; then the bill might sail through the other body. But generally, a Senate bill that has been ignored by the Senate for the first nine or so months of a two-year legislative session is not a big-enough priority to get a serious hearing in the House during the final days of the session, and vice versa.

That’s a shame, because both the House and the Senate have passed several bills that would have a positive impact on life in South Carolina, if only the other body would go along.

I’m not talking about the cigarette tax and government restructuring and payday lending and other high-profile items — although we’d certainly be better off if those did make it into law; if they don’t make it, it’ll be because too many lawmakers oppose them. I’m talking about the second-tier bills, the ones that tend to get ignored and that die not so much because they’re too controversial to touch, but rather because there’s simply not enough enthusiastic support to push them all the way through. The list is long, but here are a few of the best ideas that still could — and should — make it into law if they get that last little push:

• The sentence for people convicted of criminal domestic violence depends in large part on whether and how many times they’ve been convicted before, but state law counts only convictions in South Carolina. Someone convicted in South Carolina of assaulting his wife after multiple convictions for assaulting the same woman in North Carolina is treated as if this were his first conviction. H.3058 would allow convictions from other states to be counted as well.

Public, rank-and-file could be shut out of budget debate

Tue, 06 May 2008 01:49 EDT

NEW HOUSE members are often caught flat-footed the first time there’s a big fight over a House bill that the Senate has amended and sent back to the House.

The House has three options: It can agree to the Senate amendment, and the bill goes to the governor. It can reject it and send the bill to conference committee. Or it can amend the Senate amendment and send the bill back to the Senate, which can accept or reject the House’s change.

The tricky thing about this is that the normal procedure doesn’t apply if the House amends the Senate version: There’s no vote on the bill itself. Once the House has considered all the amendments that representatives have proposed, the bill is automatically shipped to the Senate. It can all happen in a blink of an eye.

Hold that thought, because understanding that process is key to understanding why the public — along with a lot of House members — might very well be shut out of this year’s budget-writing process in the worst way in decades.

State lawmakers have always had a nod-and-wink relationship with transparency when they decide how to spend billions of tax dollars — $7 billion this year.

Biggest obstacle for S.C. women also plagues men

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:13 EDT

I’M A statistics agnostic. When people use numbers to make their case, my first question is about where the numbers came from. I want to examine them so I can figure out whether they have any meaning. Often they don’t — or at least they don’t have the meaning being suggested.

I don’t consider statistics the third, and worst, form of lies, but I do believe they’re often misunderstood and misused. Usually, this reflects our blind spots: We see a number that confirms our preconceived notions, and we don’t ask the same questions we would ask if it didn’t support what we believed to be true.

Take the report, issued last month by the Alliance for Women and the S.C. Commission on Women, on the economic status of women in our state. The headlines proclaimed that one in seven S.C. women live in poverty.

True enough.

But dig your way to the back of the report, and you’ll find that one in seven men in South Carolina also live in poverty.

Lottery=education fantasies that do more harm than good

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:45 EDT

IT’S A BIENNIAL rite of spring: Legislative candidates sprout up and start talking about how the way to fix education is to use more of that lottery money. Maybe the voters are asking them about it when they’re out on the trail, but when they stop by to chat with our editorial board, it’s the candidates who bring up the “L” word.

This sort of talk knows no party or philosophy. I’ve heard it from voucher-loving Republicans, and Democrats who are so establishment-oriented that they oppose charter schools, and from the vast majority in between. I’ve heard it from the tax-cutters and the tax-raisers. And each time I hear it, I am reminded of how misunderstood our “education lottery” remains.

This is a perception that is so universally embraced as to have become the conventional “wisdom” — that the lottery is pulling in gobs of money, enough to be transformational if only those legislators would stop wasting it. If only they’d use it to fix our schools like they promised.

And why wouldn’t that be what people think? That’s what lottery supporters told them would happen if they’d sanction a state-run numbers racket. Our schools would be swimming in money. Our education problems would be solved. The group promoting the lottery named itself “The South Carolina Lottery for Better Schools Coalition” — and emblazoned that name on a drawing of the back of a yellow school bus. The bumper stickers even said: “Lottery=education.”

It’s been eight years — 10 if you go back to Jim Hodges’ 1998 campaign for governor that got the thing started — but the myth remains, because the only people who try to set the record straight are journalists, and we don’t do it very often. Not often enough to overcome the lies of the three-year lottery campaign.

The myth of the dictatorial governor

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:17 EDT

THURSDAY began with a meeting with House candidate John Rust, who brought up government restructuring himself, because he wanted to make sure we knew how much he disagreed with us.

“Why don’t we just hire a king and he can go out there and pick whoever he wants to run these departments?” he asked. “Or do we keep it the way it is — a democracy — and have the people elect their leaders?”

When I finally managed to claw my way through my over-stuffed in-box, a reprise of the Rust message was waiting for me:

“I saw, again, in your column, a push for enhanced gubernatorial power in South Carolina. You made reference to a leader with bold ideas that don’t get watered down by the timid legislature. Were you implying that this would protect education from unwise budget cuts? If our present governor’s bold ideas were unchecked, a good portion of our education dollar would be paying private school tuition, even bright kids who read at age five would be getting systematic phonics instruction until they were nine, and Barbara Nielson (sic) would likely be State Superintendent. At least 25% of the income tax burden would have been shifted from upper-incomes to middle and lower incomes.”

Wow.

Are senators finally ready to tackle school funding formula?

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:17 EDT

THINGS TEND to get a little bizarre toward the end of budget debate in the Senate. But last week, it felt like we had entered a parallel universe.

There was Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, who’s never met a power he didn’t want to strip from local governments, complaining that it just wasn’t fair that Charleston schools would get less EFA money next year than this year since the Legislature had capped their ability to raise property taxes to make up for the shortfall. (This is the same Sen. McConnell who wants to add a spending cap on top of that tax cap and who, yes, supported the passage of that tax cap.)

There was Sen. Greg Ryberg, who never met a spending program that wasn’t wasteful, bemoaning the need for more money for radios for prison guards and a whole list of other projects that desperately needed more funding — or at least that needed money more than those Charleston County schools did.

In an afternoon that was supposed to be an easy, quiet ending to the budget debate, the Senate nearly imploded over how to spend a tiny pot of left-over money that might not even materialize, as senators argued over “the formula” — a complicated, too-many-times-tweaked mathematical formula that considers such things as number of students, property wealth and tax rates in each district to determine how to divvy up tax dollars among the state’s 85 districts.

In the end, everybody joined hands, sang “Kumbaya” and agreed that the formula is broken and must be fixed. They agreed unanimously that it would be fixed before next year’s budget debate, and they introduced legislation that would make it theoretically possible that it could be fixed — by taking the decision out of the hands of elected officials.

Living in a perpetual state of settling

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:15 EDT

“DUM SPIRO spero,” Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman greeted me when I dropped by the Senate last week.

“Me too,” I answered.

While I breathe, I hope.

For all their shortcomings, our founders demonstrated impressive foresight when they chose our state motto.

If not for our hope that things would improve, we’d all melt into a puddle of despair.

Revenue slump illustrates problems with state tax policy

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:17 EDT

TAX POLICY isn’t officially on the table when lawmakers debate the state budget — nor should it be. But we would be missing the point if we didn’t focus on tax policy in the wake of last week’s dismal downward revenue forecast — and the resulting ripples through the budget that the Senate is debating this week

If ever there was a poster child for the crying need for a smarter approach to taxation, this situation is it.

Senate budget-writers deep-sixed state employee pay raises and new school buses and slashed an industrial recruitment closing fund and even tourism advertising when the state’s financial gurus announced that tax collections were running $90 million behind in the current fiscal year and projected that they’d come in another $90 million less than anticipated next year. These last-minute cuts, while relatively small in a $7.1 billion budget, were extracted from a budget that already included across-the-board cuts in order to make up for slowing tax collections.

The economic slow-down is not unique to South Carolina. But the way our lawmakers have chosen to collect taxes magnifies the impact that slow-down has on state services.

See if you can spot the patterns here:

Sweeter legislative pensions are down, but not yet out

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:49 EDT

YOU COULD have gotten vertigo trying to keep up with last week’s legislative pension gyrations.

When the twisting and turning was done, the conspiracy of silence had been broken, opposition was growing in the Senate, and the House had reversed its earlier unrecorded votes and taken a step toward killing the plan to add a guaranteed 2 percent annual cost-of-living adjustment to the legislative pension system. That, if you’re just tuning in, is the system that taxpayers subsidize at three times the rate at which we subsidize the pensions for full-time state employees, that lets our part-time legislators draw larger state paychecks after they retire than while they’re in office, and that even lets them keep growing their pensions at taxpayer expense after voters kick them out of office.

How last week’s actions came to happen is a story of the difference voters can make if they make their voices heard — and good reason to keep up the pressure on a fight that is not yet over.

But it’s also a story of how difficult it is to keep up with individual legislators’ votes, how unwilling most legislators are to change that and what a difference that can make in how those votes turn out: Of the six votes the House cast on the legislation last week, only three were recorded — and the three unrecorded votes all favored the pension increase. Or at least that’s how they were called.

The e-mails and phone lines were burning up after I wrote about the attempt to sneak the legislative COLA into law along with cost-of-living adjustments for rank-and-file state employees. I know, because more than a few people called or copied their notes to me. Although one senator told a constituent, in unprintable terms, that he should get himself elected if he wanted such a sweet pension, most legislators were either 1) feigning ignorance or 2) looking for cover.

This study could make a difference — if legislators would OK it

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:45 EDT

ONE OF THE Legislature’s favorite dodges is to create a study commission.

Some actually produce recommendations that get turned into law, although often as not that’s because they were created not for the purpose of actually studying an issue but rather to legitimize what the sponsors wanted to do to begin with.

My favorite example of this occurred in the late ’90s, when then-Ways and Means Chairman Henry Brown established a tax study commission that spent months and produced thousands of pages of research material and actually adopted a smart set of principles that it said should guide any tax changes. It then recommended changes that were completely at odds with those principles, and so of course the Legislature adopted one of them.

More often, though, the end of study commissions is yet another dust-gathering report.

They are created as a compromise between those who actually want to do something on a given issue and those who don’t. The people who want action can tell their constituents (or patrons) that they got something done, and they can even hold out a sliver of hope that something will be done; opponents rest comfortably knowing they have blocked any action, at least for now.

How generous is it?

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:38 EDT

• For every dollar state employees contribute to their pensions, the taxpayers kick in $1.27; for every dollar legislators pay into their system, taxpayers pay $3.91.

• The average pension for career state employees is $17,536 — 53 percent of their final salary. The average pension for our part-time legislators is $18,218 — or 102 percent of their pay.

• Former legislators can buy “service credit” at the same super-subsidized rate after they leave office. A legislator who leaves office after eight years can buy credit for $2,280 a year for the next 22 years, and then collect an annual pension of $32,980. He will recoup his “investment” in three years, and clear $33,000 a year in profit for the rest of his life.

State employees get no subsidy if they buy additional credit after they quit working.

• Former legislators can start drawing a full pension at age 60. That means an extra $91,000, on average.

House set to sweeten legislative perk, with no debate

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:47 EDT

IT’S BAD enough that our part-time legislators want to sweeten up their uber-generous legislative pension system — the one they shouldn’t even have to begin with, the one taxpayers subsidize at three times the rate we subsidize the pensions for career state employees, the one that lets legislators draw a larger state paycheck after they retire than they do while in office, and even lets them keep growing that pension at taxpayer expense even after voters kick them out of office.

But the House is poised not only to approve the plan this week, but to do so without a bit of debate. That would have happened on Thursday, but for a procedural delay. And the Senate might not be far behind.

Representatives are poised to act without so much as acknowledging what they’re doing. That means some legislators won’t realize what they’re doing — and with a few exceptions, those who do realize what they’re doing can get away with claiming ignorance.

Or rather they could have. The purpose of this column is to make sure everybody — not just voters, but legislators as well — knows what’s happening, so there can be no claims of innocence.

Like the one I got Wednesday when I asked Rep. Kenny Bingham whether the Ways and Means Committee on which he sits had even discussed the legislative perk before approving it.

On smoking, sloppiness, arrogance and poetic justice

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:15 EDT

YOU COULD say it’s poetic justice.

Or, if you wanted to be less charitable, what goes around comes around. Or, the Legislature got what it had coming.

Whatever language you use, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision upholding Greenville’s workplace smoking ban dealt a stunning blow to the sloppy, shortcut-laden way the Legislature does business. And there is no other way to see that than as a good thing. That it happened in a case that will protect the public health against increased risks of cancer, asthma and emphysema is just icing on the cake.

To understand why this ruling is about more than smoking, you have to go back to the genesis of the local smoking ban debate, in 1996.

Public health advocates were pushing legislation to let school boards declare their schools smoke-free. The tobacco and restaurant industries were up in arms over Spartanburg’s decision to ban smoking in most restaurants, shopping malls and other retail businesses, and so they cooked up a most insidious plan: They would hijack the anti-smoking bill and tack a provision on the end that declared, “Any laws, ordinances, or rules enacted pertaining to tobacco products may not supersede state law or regulation.”

Want to know what your legislators are up to? Read on

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:14 EDT

DANGER: Political slander ahead. Lies about the incumbents. Lies by the incumbents. Perhaps even another litter of squishy pink propaganda pigs poked illegally into our mailboxes, like in 2006.

With filing just closed and campaigning about to begin for legislative races, there’s every reason to believe that SCRG and Conservatives in Action and other groups that refuse to tell us where they get their money will once again clutter mailboxes and the airwaves with distortions and outright lies about legislators who dare to support public schools.

But this isn’t a column about them; after they got away with ignoring our campaign disclosure laws two years ago, I doubt the “independent” deceptions will be confined to those who are fixated on that one issue.

And all of the special-interest deceptions will be piled atop the ones that candidates have always managed to come up with all by themselves. Even the honest candidates — and most of them are, mostly — commit the sin of omission, giving us the very best picture of themselves, telling us the worst about their opponents, devoid of context.

What’s a voter to do? Besides read your newspaper, I mean.

The political parties versus the right to be left alone

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:17 EDT

I MET BARBARA the night before the Republican presidential primary; when she found out what I did for a living, the conversation took on a single-minded focus: Those automated political phone calls were an outrage; they had to be stopped. She had stopped counting the calls when they reached double-digits. (I wasn’t surprised; one friend had counted — 17 in one day.)

Two days later, her frustration had only grown. “We’re thinking about dropping our phone service and just using our cells,” she said.

My husband, who works from home, had what I considered a more extreme defense in mind. “If this keeps up,” he said, “I’m going to stop voting.”

I didn’t have the heart to remind him that as long as I kept voting, the calls would keep coming.

Robo-calls, which have been around for years but became ubiquitous during this year’s presidential campaigns, had everybody riled up back in January. They invaded the privacy of our homes, and we felt helpless to fight back. We had all signed up for the federal Do Not Call list, but political calls were exempt. Individuals couldn’t punish the perpetrators, as the free market freaks think we ought to do whenever we have a problem with anything other than government itself, because the whole market was assaulting us.

Are you one of the millions who don’t know they have diabetes?

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:43 EDT

MY PARENTS became suspicious when, at age 8, I suddenly lost all my baby fat. Another give-away: Suddenly, I was thirsty all the time. And then there was the family history. A trip to the pediatrician, a simple test, and the answer was immediate. I didn’t fully comprehend it until the second shot, the one my dad and brother had to literally hold me down for while my mom administered it.

Most people with Type 1 diabetes — which we used to call “juvenile diabetes” back before toddlers started getting so fat that they develop the obesity-related Type 2 that used to be confined to older people — either know they have it or quickly will. Their pancreas actually stops producing insulin, which the body must have in order to digest food, so the results are dramatic, and rapid.

Not so with the far more common type 2 diabetes, in which the pancreas simply can’t keep up with all the work. It can spend decades slowly killing its victims, and in the meantime rob them of their sight or their kidneys or perhaps a foot, or two, trigger heart attacks and stroke and lead to impotence.

Today is American Diabetes Alert Day, when all of us with diabetes are asked to spread the word to others about their risks and encourage those at highest risk to get tested so they can begin the treatment that can save their lives, and reduce or even prevent those quaintly termed “complications” that accompany uncontrolled diabetes. I don’t want to lose any readers if I can avoid it, so consider this your encouragement.

It’s a critical call to action, because nearly one out of three diabetics — more than 6 million people nationally — don’t know they have the disease. Another 54 million people have “pre-diabetes,” which some consider an illness and some don’t, but which most everybody agrees usually can be reversed if they change their ways.

Judge ‘Reform Caucus’ (or any reformer) by accomplishments

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:45 EDT

BACK WHEN Gov. Carroll Campbell was leading a crusade to overhaul a government ripped apart by scandal and abuse, a decree went out in The State newsroom that articles about his efforts to consolidate state agencies and turn control of them over to the governor should be referred to as “government restructuring” rather than “government reform.”

“Reform” is an editorial word, a political word. Indeed, few terms in the political lexicon are more abused. It might even surpass “politically incorrect,” which has come to mean “anything I don’t like and don’t want to have to argue against on its merits.” The former, of course, tends to mean “anything I like and don’t want to have to argue for on the merits.” But while “politically incorrect” is used as a weapon almost exclusively by the political right, everybody wants to claim the mantle of reformer.

Which brings us to the new Legislative Reform Caucus.

The bipartisan caucus, whose membership remains sketchy, launched last week touting “basic reform measures to streamline government and make it more open by using technology.” Its “Blueprint for Reform” focuses on good government initiatives — outlawing taxpayer-funded lobbyists, requiring full disclosure for special-interest campaign spending and online reporting for candidates, smarter budgeting, less pork, webcasting of government meetings — with a few bizarre measures thrown in, most notably popular election of the state insurance commissioner.

The news release quotes caucus co-chairman Sen. Ray Cleary as saying “good government is not partisan, and reform of an antiquated system is long overdue.”

An outsiders’ view of S.C. government strikes familiar chord

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:44 EDT

THE FOLKS at the Budget and Control Board are crowing — and justifiably so — about a new report from the respected Pew Center on the States that ranked South Carolina second-best nationally for its management of the state workforce.

The 2008 “Grading the States” report called the board’s Office of Human Resources Management “a model for the rest of the state’s agencies,” thanks to the way it organizes data and disseminates it to other agencies. It received particularly high marks for figuring out the kinds of employees the state will need and how to find them, retaining good employees and linking performance to rewards.

That sounds deadly boring, but it’s no small thing; getting the right people in the right jobs can make all the difference in whether an agency — or a business — succeeds or fails.

But can is the operative word here.

The first thing that struck me about this report was what it says about how well our government could be run if we didn’t organize and run it in such a screwy way. Although we got a great score on people management, we tied for second from last on managing our infrastructure, and scored a B-minus overall, the national average.