TheState.com: Cindi Scoppe

Scoppe: Powerful, underused law takes center stage in ESC battle

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:13 EST

IT WAS EASY to overlook the fig leaf that Gov. Mark Sanford draped over his administration when he relented at the last minute and signed a federal loan request to keep unemployment insurance from running dry for laid-off workers.

But his threat to fire officials if they refused to give him the unemployment data that he had been seeking deserves some attention, because it’s a smart use of a grossly underused law and because it raises questions about why this episode of brinkmanship even occurred to begin with.

Mr. Sanford bases his threat on sections 1-3-10 and 1-3-240 of the S.C. Code of Laws. The first section requires any official in the executive branch to “immediately furnish to the Governor, in such form as he may require, any information desired by him in relation to their respective affairs or activities.” The second lets the governor remove any state or local official whom he determines to be “guilty of malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetency, absenteeism, conflicts of interest, misconduct, persistent neglect of duty in office, or incapacity.”

It’s tempting to call these powerful laws “obscure,” because they certainly don’t get the work-out they deserve. But the information law is no secret to Mr. Sanford, who is mired in a dispute over his 2007 demand for information from the Workers Compensation Commission, whose members he appoints but whom he cannot fire without justification. Just last month, a federal judge ordered that commission not to give the governor any information until he could further consider the matter.

A lot of people (myself included) considered Mr. Sanford’s 2007 use of the information law an inappropriate, perhaps even illegal, attempt to bully Workers Comp commissioners into ruling the way he wanted in cases between injured workers and their employers. He had demanded detailed explanations for their decisions. Although the governor didn’t explicitly threaten to fire commissioners who didn’t comply, many of us read an implicit threat into his request.

Scoppe: A parable about principle and power

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:12 EST

I’M RETURNING to the Nikki Haley saga for what I hope will be the last time because it so dramatically illustrates the difficult decision every legislator with any integrity eventually faces: how much to compromise ideas or even principals in order to get along with other legislators, who largely determine how effective you are.

Most legislators choose the middle way: Rather than making waves, they quietly vote against plans they disagree with. A few will actively support what they know to be lousy ideas, believing they can do more good in the long run if they amass power by carrying water for the leadership.

But with her decision first to team up with House critics on her proposal to force more recorded votes and then to speak publicly about what she saw as retribution, Rep. Haley cast herself as the other extreme: the whistleblower who fights what she sees as wrong, regardless of the political repercussions. It’s the role played regularly by Gov. Mark Sanford, who has strong public support but few legislative accomplishments.

Ms. Haley’s decisions offer a rare glimpse inside the tight-knit world of legislative interpersonal relationships, because even those who push their causes aggressively rarely talk about the consequences, which usually aren’t as obvious as those suffered by Ms. Haley and blogger and Rep. Nathan Ballentine, when House Speaker Bobby Harrell shunted them off to what they consider lesser committee assignments.

Even the bridge-burners aren’t immune to the pressure to be team players. When she first accused Mr. Harrell of targeting her for retaliation, during a meeting last month with Brad Warthen and me, Ms. Haley refused to discuss what happened inside a closed Republican Caucus meeting, where Mr. Harrell reportedly made what some interpreted as threats. She would go only so far as to say it was made clear that the speaker and caucus would not support her proposal. “What happens in those meetings is supposed to be private,” she explained. (This allegiance to the code is all the more incredible when you recall that it’s a violation of state law for those meetings to be private if at least 63 representatives — a quorum of the House — attend.)

Scoppe: There’s no obvious way out of budget crisis

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:13 EST

I’VE BEEN struggling to find something useful to say about our state’s deepening financial crisis.

Sure, I can say the Legislature needs to figure out what’s most important, direct all of our dwindling tax dollars at that and eliminate everything else — and it should and must. But you can’t do that with a snap of your fingers. It takes time to shut down whole programs and whole agencies — even if you can get 170 people to agree on what the targets should be. And spending has to be cut right now, not in July. (Actually, it has to be slashed now and in July; more on that in a moment.)

I could say we need to consolidate duplicative agencies — and we do. But that takes even longer to produce savings, and in fact it can actually increase costs in the short term.

I could say lawmakers need to eliminate some tax loopholes or take back some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts they’ve doled out in recent years. But in addition to being a monumental waste of ink, and the fact that it would take several months to generate money from that, and the fact that piecemeal tax increases are just as destructive as all those piecemeal tax cuts, I’m not comfortable suggesting tax increases during the worst recession in most of our lifetimes. (Except the cigarette tax. There is never a bad time to raise the cigarette tax, whether as part of an overhaul or by itself, because it serves a far more important function than generating money.)

So I thought instead I’d just describe the problem. Not with the numbers we’ve been reading in this and other newspapers — how many millions are cut from this agency, what percentage is lopped from that — but with the real-life consequences of the cuts:

Scoppe: Federal bailout could put Sanford’s ideology to the test

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:13 EST

GOV. MARK Sanford recently told stateline.org that cutting government spending was his “be-all, end-all” reason for getting into politics.

Downsizing government is an enormously popular idea, made all the more popular here in South Carolina by a Legislature that seems determined to make the governor’s case that government is extravagantly wasteful, what with its “competitive grants” boondoggles and its bean museum (never actually funded, but who knew?) and its reflexive rejection of even the most reasonable of Mr. Sanford’s proposals.

Or at least it’s popular in theory. And so far, it’s all been entirely theoretical: Mr. Sanford throws out red meat to civic groups and groupies on his e-mail lists, attacking wasteful spending, demanding spending caps and tax caps; the Legislature ignores him. He vetoes pork and even the entire budget; the Legislature overrides him.

If the downside to being the governor of South Carolina is that you have practically no power, the upside — at least for someone who insists on ideological purity — is that you have practically no power. You can remain pure without having to feel the repercussions of that purity.

But that could soon change, as Washington begins to play a larger role in state spending. And this could produce a fascinating test of whether South Carolinians really share Mr. Sanford’s vision of government or whether — like Americans who hate the Congress but love their congressman — they become less enchanted with it once it shifts from abstract theory to dollars-and-cents reality.

Scoppe: When piecemeal tax policy (inevitably) goes awry

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:51 EST

FROM THE “be careful what you ask for” file come two little-noticed provisions in the 2006 property tax reduction law that are actually raising tax bills for a lot of people.

I’ve written about both before, but the effects are growing more dramatic, which means the demands for the Legislature to fix things are growing louder, which means a lot more people need to understand what’s going on, how we got here and why the proposed fixes make no sense.

First, homeowners are seeing their property taxes rise more than they normally would have as an unintended but entirely predictable consequence of a cap that the Legislature slapped on how much local governments could raise tax rates every year. (Also predictable: Piecemeal tax changes result in problems no one thought through.)

That cap — pegged at the rate of population growth plus the rate of inflation — sent city and county officials into a tax-raising panic when they realized what would happen in the future when they needed more money than the cap allowed. Like squirrels preparing for winter, they began hoarding their tax-increase allowance, raising taxes the maximum allowed by the law, whether they need the money right now or not. Of course, they also spend it whether they need to or not, which means they aren’t really preparing for future needs, but then panic rarely leads to wise decisions.

Here in Columbia, Mayor Bob Coble has been up-front and unapologetic about the strategy. As he explained this spring, when the City Council was preparing to max out on its tax increase: “In today’s world, we have no choice. We can only raise millage for inflation and population growth. Either you take it or you lose it. We would not be able to catch up.”

Scoppe: Proposals at heart of House brouhaha neither all good nor all bad

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:15 EST

WHETHER you think Rep. Nikki Haley’s claim that House leaders are trying to punish her for pushing an openness measure is real, imagined or fabricated, legislators will be asked to vote on two very real policy proposals at the center of the dispute.

Ms. Haley argues that her plan to require recorded votes on all bills and the plan to let the speaker appoint committee chairmen both address the same issue — accountability — but that they move in opposite directions. She calls her plan an essential step toward restoring public trust in government and the other one “dangerous.”

But in fact, there’s more gray than black or white in either.

Let’s take a look at them, starting with the least-scrutinized plan — to let the speaker, rather than committee members, appoint committee chairmen.

Rep. Kenny Bingham, the soon-to-be-elected Republican Caucus chairman who is a point man for the proposal, says it addresses an immediate problem: Three chairmen are not returning to their posts this year — the most since Republicans took over the House in 1994 — and the races to replace them have degenerated into bidding contests.

Scoppe: Nikki vs. the speaker

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:14 EST

POLITICS CAN be a brutal sport, but we in South Carolina rarely see the type of retribution that Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley says she’s experiencing because of her campaign to force the Legislature to take recorded votes on all bills.

House leaders say she’s seeing plots where none exist, and some have suggested that her vision is deliberately skewed — the better to make herself a victim to advance statewide political ambitions.

At issue is a proposal floated this month at a House Republican Caucus meeting to let the speaker appoint committee chairmen, rather than having them elected by committee members; it could come up for a vote in the full House during the Dec. 2 organizational session. Ms. Haley charges that Speaker Bobby Harrell wants the change because he’s “very angry with me” over her recorded-voting campaign and this is the only way he can stop her from being elected to chair the powerful Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee.

Ms. Haley, a third-term legislator who has risen rapidly in no small part because Mr. Harrell has given her key appointments, told me she’s disappointed but not surprised by the proposal, which was sold to caucus members as a way to keep Democrats from wielding too much influence in the majority-Republican House.

“I approached leadership about on-the-record voting, and I was warned not to pursue the legislation and told we don’t need that, we don’t want to go there, it’s not necessary,” she said. “I chose to pursue it anyway. After that, it was made very clear to me by leadership in no uncertain terms that the speaker was not going to let me have that chairmanship.”

Scoppe: Quick: Why is the ER so crowded? The answer might surprise you

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:15 EST

WHETHER you think it’s the fault of the uninsured or of a system that allows their plight, conventional wisdom has long blamed those without insurance for the overuse of emergency rooms for routine medical care, which is one of the big drivers of both skyrocketing medical costs and the overcrowding that threatens actual emergency care.

It’s a logical assumption: Emergency rooms are barred by federal law from turning away patients, so of course those who can’t afford to pay for their care will go there rather than to the doctor’s office.

But it’s wrong on two counts. The uninsured are not the people clogging up the emergency room, and they’re not even the ones who are abusing it. The culprit, it seems, is us — the insured.

A report earlier this year from the Center for Studying Health System Change said the uninsured account for just 17 percent of the visits for such “non-urgent” or routine care as cold and flu symptoms, minor cuts and sprains, rashes, dental problems and prescription refills; privately insured patients accounted for 40 percent, Medicare patients 17 percent and Medicaid patients 25 percent. The reason the uninsured don’t go to the emergency room as much as we think, the center suggested, is that while the hospital can’t refuse to treat them, it can send them a bill and do whatever it can to collect.

A second team of researchers, writing in the Oct. 22-27 Journal of the American Medical Association, reported that although the number of uninsured using the emergency room continues to rise (as does the number of insured), uninsured patients are actually sicker than the insured who go there. That makes sense: One of the reasons my colleagues and I have long called for increases in Medicaid spending and policies that would promote more private insurance coverage is that people without any sort of insurance tend not to get the preventive treatment and medications they need to avoid costly illnesses, and they tend not to go to the doctor when they first start getting sick.

Scoppe: How much would you give up to vote? And should you have to?

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:17 EST

I GOT UP an hour early on Election Day, foolishly thinking I could avoid the crowd if I showed up at my polling place a few minutes before 7. Wrong. At 6:50 a.m., the closest place to park was three long blocks away, and several people weren’t even driving, but walking from their homes. I went to the office an hour early.

I tried again at 11, hoping to beat the lunch crowd. This time I snagged a parking spot someone had just vacated, within a block; I walked into the school building, looked at the line snaking three times through the gym, up the stairs, down a hall and who knows how far around that corner, and went back to work.

A bit before 4, I tried again.

I had no idea what to expect — or what I would do. Was I willing to wait an hour, two, more, to vote in a presidential election in which I would be perfectly happy with either winner, U.S. Senate and House races whose outcomes were not in doubt, legislative, County Council and countywide non-races where the incumbents were unopposed? (“You need to set an example,” my priest had admonished me on Sunday when I mused about doing the unthinkable — not voting.) I didn’t have to answer the question: This time, the street was virtually empty; the line had evaporated, and only two other voters were in sight. More than half the time I spent in my polling place was chatting with poll workers, who reported that the crowds started dissipating around 2.

Fortunately, my polling place is a three-minute drive from my office, and I was free to come and go as needed, come in late or leave early.

Underfunding colleges and overstating state spending

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:14 EST

NOT EVERYONE was crazy about my recent comment that it made sense for colleges to take the biggest budget cuts because “those deep cuts add up to only 2 percent to 5 percent of their overall budgets.”

One person even asked for a correction. As much as I sympathized with her argument, though, I couldn’t find a clear error.

But my conversations reminded me of how many people are not fully aware of a significant and disturbing change in state spending, and of what a terribly misleading picture people can get of the size of state government from standard budget documents.

Let’s start with the dramatic change: the steady reduction of taxpayer support for our colleges.

Unlike our neighbor to the north, which has always made higher education a priority and has given state colleges enough money to keep tuitions reasonable, South Carolina has never put a lot of money into the colleges and universities that it owns.

I really wouldn’t be such a nag if your life didn’t depend on it

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:13 EDT

PUBLIC HEALTH officials were in Columbia recently to grapple with agonizingly difficult questions about how the state will react to the next influenza pandemic — who gets the vaccine once one is developed (there won’t be enough for everyone), who gets the limited supply of hospital beds, how we’re supposed to survive if businesses shut down.

It is essential preparation, but the threat the rest of us need to be preparing for is the garden-variety flu, which peaks in the winter when people are cramped up indoors and more likely to breathe in each others’ germs. Influenza kills more than 500 South Carolinians every year. More than 4,000 of our friends and neighbors have to be hospitalized. Nationally, more than 36,000 people die from the flu every year, and 200,000 are hospitalized.

And you and I and every other individual with absolutely no medical expertise can slash those numbers to virtually nothing, simply by getting our flu shots — and, even more important, making sure kids get their shots.

Finally, finally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has taken serious note of serious studies and plain old common sense, and is recommending this year that all children from 6 months to 18 years old get a flu shot. The CDC says it makes this recommendation primarily because of clear evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective for kids, increased evidence of “substantial adverse impacts” of the flu on kids, and the belief that simplifying the recommendation will increase vaccination rates. (The convoluted recommendation last year was a flu shot for everyone 6 months to 5 years old, and older kids who have specific medical conditions or who come into contact with younger kids or the elderly — and I don’t know, probably everybody born on a Tuesday morning.)

The flu shot is amazing. It offers a protection rate of up to 90 percent — which is something you want when as many as one in five of the people you know is likely to get the flu. About the worst thing that’s likely to happen as a result of getting the shot is that your arm will be sore for a day or two; you might — might, and it’s never happened to me, in more than 35 years of getting the shot every year — feel crummy for a day.

Lessons, and danger signs, from the budget-cutting session

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:13 EDT

THE RESULTS of last week’s budget-cutting legislative session were about as un-bad as you could hope for, under the circumstances. The process was an entirely different matter.

The bare-bones budget that landed on Gov. Mark Sanford’s desk Friday is virtually unchanged from what legislative leaders presented to the House and Senate budget-writing committees — and to the public — just seven days earlier.

This is unprecedented, by more degrees than I can count:

It is unprecedented for the Senate to pass the Finance Committee’s budget bill without changing it.

It is unprecedented for the Senate Finance Committee to pass the House’s budget bill without changing it.

Undecided, and awaiting an epiphany

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:16 EDT

I BOUGHT myself two weeks by copping out when our editorial board decided whom to endorse for president. For all the good it’s done so far.

One week to go, and I remain an undecided voter.

I’ve never been in this position before. Never stayed on the sidelines in an important endorsement decision before.

Oh, I’ve been undecided about what I would do in the voting booth. But that indecision wasn’t over which candidate to support; it was over whether I could hold my nose hard enough to cast my ballot for the candidate I agreed we should endorse, or whether to leave that race blank. What’s different this time is that I want to vote for both the candidates.

Neither is clearly superior in my mind. Both John McCain and Barack Obama bring an approach to politics that is sorely lacking in Washington and, increasingly, throughout our nation. They see it not as a game to win — and certainly not as an opportunity to demolish “the other side” — but rather as a way to debate issues and reach conclusions that are best for our country. Both have shown they’re willing to look beyond party labels and rigid ideologies; Sen. McCain has a much clearer track record on this score, but at the same time, he has strayed further during this campaign than has Sen. Obama. If for no other reason than their approach to politics, I believe that either man would greatly improve our nation.

Budget fix isn’t perfect, but it’s refreshingly responsible

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:14 EDT

I LIKE WHAT I’m seeing in the shrinking state budget.

Well, not like as in I think it meets our state’s needs, or gets all the details or even all the priorities right (more on that in a moment). But like as in I’m impressed with the responsible way legislators are dealing with an extraordinarily difficult situation.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell and Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman and House Speaker Bobby Harrell and Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper are to be commended for making this happen, as is the rest of the Legislature. So is Gov. Mark Sanford. Although his nagging and insisting and demanding that lawmakers come back to work (even before it would have been wise to do so) bordered on demagoguery at times, it clearly had a good effect.

I, on the other hand, thought it would be a waste of money to bring lawmakers back to town, because I had absolutely no faith that they would act responsibly; I am delighted to have been wrong.

The best thing they’re doing is targeting the cuts, but not too much: Instead of treating every function of state government as equally important, and every agency as equally well-managed, the budget the Senate is expected to pass today reflects a definite hierarchy of values, with cuts ranging from a low of 3.6 percent for the public schools to 15 percent for colleges. And for the most part, lawmakers are leaving it to each agency to decide what to cut — the wrong approach when you’re writing a budget for next year, but the safest and probably best approach when you have a week to make cuts that must start generating savings immediately.

There’s an obvious place to cut $3.5 million from budget

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:13 EDT

THREE AND a half million dollars doesn’t make a big splash when you’re trying to fill a $500 million hole in your budget bucket. But neither is it a trifling amount.

With $3.5 million you could not lay off 78 classroom teachers, or 91 Highway Patrol troopers, or 118 prison guards. You could not park the school buses for another 11 days. You could start back up our puny smoking cessation program — and nearly double it. You could use a little more than 10 percent of the money to pull down $4 million from the feds for the teen pregnancy prevention program that got axed last month. As The (Charleston) Post & Courier’s Gene Sapakoff noted, you also could send 188 students to Clemson on full scholarships, or purchase the laptops the school suggests for 3,219 students.

Or you could pay a football coach to go away.

Buyouts for public college coaches are offensive at any time, but the timing of the one up in Clemson last week makes it particularly outrageous.

Legislators are back to Columbia in October — October — to close a half-billion-dollar budget hole. They’re determined to cut 7 percent out of state government spending. The Greenville News reports that Clemson officials put together a plan to cut $11 million from classified and unclassified positions and fringe benefits; Clemson President Jim Barker warned that cuts “will be felt” — even before budget writers decided to cut the school’s funding by $16.5 million.

Forget what I’ve said for a decade: This time, apply the Band-Aid

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:14 EDT

FINALLY, OUR legislative leaders are talking about making targeted budget cuts and refusing to keep the government running by raiding trust funds and relying on other one-time money — the difficult, disciplined approach that I started insisting on when our state got into fiscal trouble a decade ago — and I find myself wanting to say ... Now, let’s not be too rash.

I’m particularly concerned about the idea of swearing off one-time money and cutting current-year spending by the entire 7 percent — which effectively would be about 9 percent, since we’re more than a quarter of the way through the budget year.

More on that in a moment, but first let’s talk about targeted cuts, because I think you need to understand what they can and can’t accomplish before you understand why I’m doing what looks like a flip-flop on one-time money.

If by “targeted” lawmakers mean cutting other agencies more than 7 percent so they can cut education, Medicaid and the prisons less, I’m all for it. But if they mean doing what my colleagues and I have long called for and targeting specific programs within those agencies, I’m concerned.

I first started re-examining my positions when Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell said lawmakers need to “take a serious look at each program and see if that program is as important as another program and then make our decisions accordingly.”

Judiciary isn’t only branch of government that polices itself

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:15 EDT

I GOT A CALL last week from a lawyer who had just read my column on the judicial discipline system and suggested I follow up by looking into how professions other than his allow lay people to play a role in judging their ethics.

It might be an interesting comparison — if I were writing about the regulation of the legal profession. I wasn’t.

In fact, I had deliberately avoided even reading the American Bar Association’s recommendations on our attorney discipline system. As important as the regulation of the legal profession (or any other profession) is, it is minuscule compared to overseeing one of the three branches of our government.

But while comparing the regulation of lawyers to that of doctors or insurance agents or barbers isn’t relevant to this discussion, the idea of providing some context is excellent: That is, how do the current and proposed disciplinary systems for the judiciary compare to those for the executive and legislative branches?

It’s a mixed answer, because all three branches of our government have their own systems.

When is failure not failure? When the task isn’t humanly possible

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:17 EDT

IF SOMEONE orders you to run a mile in 60 seconds, you’re going to fail. But failing to do the impossible does not make you a failure. It simply highlights how absurd the goal — and anyone who expects you to meet it — is.

That’s the situation South Carolina schools found themselves in last week, when state officials announced that only one in five elementary and middle schools made what’s called adequate yearly progress under federal law. And it’s the situation the rest of the nation’s schools are just a bit behind us in finding themselves in.

Federal law says that by 2014, every student in the nation — or rather, every public school student in the nation; private school students don’t even have to take the tests — must score “proficient” in grade-level math and reading tests, and it requires the states to meet their own targets for moving toward that goal each year. If even one student fails the tests in 2014, the entire school will be labeled a failure.

Now, it should be fairly obvious that asking every single student in a school — much less every single student in the nation — to score proficient, or even to pass a test, is ridiculous. You probably couldn’t meet that goal even if all you asked students to do was add two plus two; somebody would misread the question, or decide it’d be fun to put “one.”

In other words, the entire notion is bankrupt.

Judicial discipline system quite typical of S.C.

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:48 EDT

THE MOST significant recommendation from the American Bar Association’s review of our state’s judicial discipline system isn’t in its report. To find it, you have to read the Bar’s Model Rules for Judicial Discipline and Disability Retirement.

That document recommends not only that some body other than a state’s supreme court act as final arbiter of complaints against members of the high court, but also that the entire process up to that point have a degree of independence that would be foreign to our state.

Our process follows the model rules pretty closely: The Office of Disciplinary Counsel reviews complaints against judges, and lawyers. Most are screened out, because they clearly don’t involve misconduct; typically, these come from people whose only complaint is that they lost a court case.

Many of the remaining complaints are dismissed after investigation, by a panel of the Commission on Judicial Conduct. The Supreme Court hears only those cases that make it to a hearing before a commission panel.

In 2006-2007, 304 complaints were filed, 157 were screened out, 57 were dismissed after a preliminary investigation, and 17 were dismissed by an investigative panel of the commission. A total of seven made it all the way to the Supreme Court, according to Chief Disciplinary Counsel Lesley Coggiola. The Bar said the numbers were “not inconsistent with those in other states.”

Shooting ourselves in the foot, once again

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:16 EDT

IT’S NO longer just speculation: Traffic in South Carolina actually dropped in the past year. Figures the state Department of Transportation compiled for The Post and Courier of Charleston show reductions at all 16 points examined — from 0.1 percent at one point in Charleston to 3.5 percent here in the Midlands and nearly 9 percent along I-95.

This is great news if you’re worried about traffic fatalities (down 17 percent from last year) or gridlock or carbon tire treads or shipping money off to petro-dictators so they can fund terrorists who want to bomb us back to the Stone Age.

If you care about getting your potholes filled, or driving across the bridge without it collapsing — not so great.

It’s the paradox of traffic policy: Whether for environmental, public safety or national security reasons, we need to reduce the number of miles we drive, or at least to slow the increase. But less driving means less gas tax revenue, and even if we were to succeed beyond our wildest dreams, we’d still have to maintain the roads and bridges we have. So accomplishing one goal means falling further behind on the other.

This problem is not unique to South Carolina. It is faced to some degree by every state and community that uses gas tax revenues for highway construction and maintenance — which is to say, by every state in the nation.