TheState.com: Cindi Scoppe

Scoppe: Long-awaited inspector general bodes well for state

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:06 EST

IT’S EASY TO get so frustrated by all the things the Legislature is not accomplishing — or even trying to accomplish — that we fail to notice when it finally does something significant. That happened last month, when good-government advocates prevailed in a quarter-century effort to create an independent state inspector general with significant authority to not only root out the cliched “waste, fraud and abuse” but force state agencies to do things in a smarter way.

Gov. Nikki Haley managed to draw some attention to the new law, by holding a ceremonial signing ceremony after the media went for three weeks without reporting its passage. But while the event generated some coverage, the law came across as a mere formality, extending the powers of a position Ms. Haley had created last year by executive order. That characterization grossly downplays the significance of the law — and of the governor’s role in getting it passed.

The position Ms. Haley created fell woefully short on two counts: It had no formal authority, deriving its power only from the governor’s support, and it had no independence. Although we have far too many positions in state government that are insulated from political accountability, an inspector general is one of the handful of officials who need that independence, so he doesn’t have to worry about stepping on the toes of the governor, or anyone else. But by creating a dependent inspector general to look into allegations of abuse in her Cabinet agencies, Ms. Haley probably pushed the Legislature to finally stop playing games and pass the law that creates a real inspector general, with full investigative powers.

Fully empowered state inspectors general exist in only a handful of states, but they can play a powerful role in identifying and correcting small and large cases of abuse as well as practices that are legal but just don’t make any sense. The Legislative Audit Council does some of that already, but only at legislators’ request, and because its investigations tend to be exhaustive, often zeroing in on procedural niceties, it isn’t able to look at most complaints. An inspector general can pursue a single complaint — from a legislator, an agency director, a state employee or just an interested citizen — verify that there is or isn’t a problem, and move on to the next complaint.

LAC reports sometimes produce change, but often are ignored by the Legislature. South Carolina’s inspector general can recommend cases for criminal prosecution, prosecute cases before the State Ethics Commission and file civil actions for recovery of funds. Potentially more important, he has the authority to “recommend policies and carry out other activities designed to deter, detect, and eradicate fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement, misconduct, violations of state or federal law, and wrongdoing in state government.” And where he finds that employees have engaged in “wrongdoing” (which is broadly defined to encompass far more than just criminal activity), he can require agency directors to submit a report “describing any and all actions taken with the employee and within the agency to prevent the alleged conduct from occurring again.”

Scoppe: ‘Alternative’ doesn’t automatically mean risky

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:37 EST

IN 2006, OFFICIALS with the S.C. Retirement System Investment Commission met with our editorial board to discuss a constitutional amendment that would let them invest in foreign companies and non-publicly traded assets, from venture capital funds and well-established companies about to go public to gold, oil and hedge funds.

The Legislature had just created the commission a year earlier, in a cutting-edge model to put investment professionals instead of politicians in charge of the state’s $26 billion pension system. Lawmakers expected this to produce a more sophisticated investment strategy, and they demanded higher rates of return. The constitutional amendment was part of the commission’s plan to diversify the portfolio so it could meet that demand without increasing the level of risk.

Officials walked us through charts showing how some asset classes tracked the stock market while others moved on the opposite cycle, so that one peaked while the other bottomed out. They pointed as their model to such gold-standard endowments as the Harvard Endowment, which maximized their returns by investing not in higher-risk stocks but in the right combination of asset classes.

The investment commission made its presentation to anyone who would listen, and after voters approved the change to the constitution, it spent the next five years implementing that strategy.

It is a strategy that has seen our annual rate of return increase from 5.1 percent in 2006 to 18.6 percent last year.

Scoppe: One unemployment proposal is truly scandalous

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:48 EST

THERE’S BEEN a tremendous amount of political energy expended — on both sides — over provocative proposals to make laid-off workers pass drug tests and do volunteer work, and even over more measured plans to further limit who can receive unemployment benefits and how much they receive.

The drug testing and forced volunteerism are side shows, offered up by lawmakers worried that our state is being overrun by hordes of drug-addicted deadbeats who refuse to do an honest day’s work because they’re getting so rich off of that $235 check they get every week for being unemployed.

And restrictions on who can receive how much in benefits are nibbling around the edges of the primary goal: reducing the amount of money businesses pay to support the unemployment insurance program.

That’s a perfectly reasonable goal. Except when it isn’t. And in order to judge its reasonableness, we need to consider a little context.

That context begins in late 2008, when we learned that the state’s Employment Security Commission had burned through an $800 million trust fund and was on the way to borrowing what would become nearly $1 billion from the federal government.

Scoppe: Our experiment in voluntary tax compliance

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:20 EST

I WAS SURPRISED by my email from Amazon saying I owed S.C. use taxes for $340 worth of purchases I made last year from the online behemoth.

Not surprised to receive the email: I knew that a new state law required the company to send out the notices, and I remembered a small purchase I made late last year through Amazon, of an item I couldn’t find locally.

But I had forgotten all about the faucet. Which I purchased while I was renovating my kitchen (the sort of experience you’d think would be hard to forget). And even used in a starring role in a column I wrote about the debate over whether to grant Amazon a special tax break in return for opening a distribution center in Lexington County.

I realize that I am in a decided minority: I am fully aware of the use tax, which we all are required to pay on taxable items that we don’t pay a sales tax on, usually because they’re purchased online, and I have every intention of paying it via my state income tax return. Still, I rarely order online, and when I do it’s usually from companies with a physical presence in South Carolina — which is to say companies that, with the exception of Amazon, charge me the state sales tax — so the use tax isn’t something that’s top of mind in my personal life.

But it’s a growing problem for our state. Between the few like me who know about the law but forget about their purchases, and the huge number of people who either have never heard of the tax or know about it but have no intention of paying it, because they figure (correctly) that their odds of getting caught are minuscule, the state lost out on an estimated $111 million in use taxes last year — including $2.5 million due on products purchased through Amazon.com.

Scoppe: The slog toward reform

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:32 EST

TOM DAVIS sounded practically giddy as he drove to Columbia Tuesday morning to begin the Senate’s fourth week of debate (this year) on legislation to abolish the hermaphroditic Budget and Control Board and divvy up its powers between the Legislature and a new Department of Administration controlled by the governor.

“I honestly think this thing has gotten to a tipping point,” he said. “It truly is amazing. It’s sort of like all the things you thought were never going to happen … it’s gonna happen. It’s just a question of the degree. It’s kind of exciting for people who have been involved for so long.”

Sen. Vincent Sheheen, the Democratic member of the restructuring tag-team, was more reserved. The legislation, he said, “will not be perfect because the political realities mean that some things will probably not be exactly as purists may want — but it already is a vast, vast improvement structurally over what we have.”

“The goal here is to empower the executive branch and empower the legislative branch so we can have a decently functioning government,” he told the Senate Tuesday afternoon, as he unveiled the latest plan. He and Sens. Davis and Shane Massey have been working on this proposal, in one way or another, since they convinced the Senate in June to reject the House’s restructuring-lite plan in favor of the most muscular overhaul proposal in two decades.

The June 2 plan abolished the Budget and Control Board and transferred most of its duties to the new Department of Administration. But it created a less-powerful clone of board to control borrowing, procurement and large property sales and insurance settlements, and make mid-year budget cuts.

Scoppe: When gambling looks like the best option

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:57 EST

PERHAPS IT’S A coincidence that the Catawba Indian Nation renewed its efforts to force our state to authorize high-stakes gambling just as the Cherokees started trying to build political support for a casino in Jasper County. But there’s much the same about the two efforts, and the Catawbas’ latest lawsuit should remind us that while the battle is over gambling, and we’re right to oppose those efforts, there’s a much larger issue at play, and our state is on the wrong side.

Gambling interests are in the hunt for suckers. To come throw away their money. To welcome casinos into their communities.

On today’s Commentary page, Hardeeville Mayor Bronco Bostick argues that the Cherokee Indians’ proposal to build a casino and hotel, with a promise of 3,800 jobs and a $156 million annual payroll, is just what his struggling town needs to get back on its feet. “Other parts of South Carolina have gotten their share of major economic development announcements,” he writes. “Now it’s our turn.”

My heart goes out to his community. But we don’t make policy decisions with our hearts. At least we shouldn’t. We make them with our heads.

What our heads tell us is that you don’t transform a community by exploiting human weaknesses. That a casino might be good for the casino operators, and for the few people who get jobs serving drinks and working the tables, but the impact on the community can be devastating.

Scoppe: Who we are, and who the nation thinks we are

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:14 EST

THE NATION LOOKS to South Carolina every four years to see what we have to say about the presidential race. I look to the presidential race to see what it says about South Carolina, and this year’s picture wasn’t particularly flattering.

Last week’s primary had a lot less in common with four years ago, when Republicans nominated one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met and Democrats embraced a message of hope, than with 2000, when we essentially ended John McCain’s first presidential bid after a well-orchestrated smear campaign alleged that his adopted Bengali-born daughter was biologically his own illegitimate black child and that he had given secrets to his Vietnamese captors, and spread lies about his positions on hot-button issues.

What happened this year was tame by comparison, and less clear cut. Certainly, and the nation knows this, some South Carolinians were genuinely attracted to Newt Gingrich’s big ideas and his pugnacious style. Others liked his Republican version of the Occupy Wall Street message, and what red-blooded Republican wouldn’t relish his assault on the media? He probably benefitted from his own Will Folks moment, when voters were just so disgusted with what they saw as an unfair allegation about his sex life that they threw their support behind him.

But make no mistake about it: For much of the nation, the take-away from South Carolina is that our state rushed to embrace Mr. Gingrich after he used an obviously, if not overtly, race-based appeal to whip a Myrtle Beach crowd into a frenzy during the nationally televised Martin Luther King Day debate. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again.

Here’s what the overwhelming majority of us can all feel good about: 91 percent of S.C. voters did not support Mr. Gingrich.

Scoppe: The state of our state is ... a mixed bag

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:39 EST

ON THE MORNING after Gov. Nikki Haley called on lawmakers to quit complaining about her role in giving the Savannah Port a leg up over the Port of Charleston, the House debated a measure to overrule the port decision.

Well, debated isn’t the right word; best as I could tell, Rep. Ralph Norman was the only person in the chamber defending the decision by the board of the Department of Health and Environmental Control to grant Georgia a permit it needs to dredge the Savannah River to 48 feet. House members don’t usually think too much of senators, and vice versa, but by Thursday, representatives had latched onto Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell’s characterization of the decision as “the rape of the river” and gave little doubt that they would adopt the measure that the Senate had approved unanimously two days earlier.

And although Rep. Jim Merrill was trying really hard to tamp down Democrats’ more pointed innuendo about what Ms. Haley was getting out of the deal, he made it clear that he wasn’t any more moved than he had been the previous evening, when he and the rest of the Legislature declined to grant the governor the applause she so clearly was expecting when she declared that “I am not afraid of a 48-foot Georgia port, 36 miles up the Savannah River, confined to one-way traffic. You should not be either.”

Across the hall, the Senate at least was debating legislation the governor had asked for in her State of the State address: a bill to abolish the anachronistic Budget and Control Board and give her control over the central administrative functions of government. Not that senators got anywhere on the fourth of what should be many days of debate; before they adjourned, they received a 200-page document spelling out the details of the current bill and comparing it to a competing proposal, along with instructions from Mr. McConnell to analyze it over the weekend and come back to work today prepared to plow through a series of complex amendments.

The speech itself was as much of a mixed bag as legislators’ response.

Scoppe: On evolution and pragmatic flexibility

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:36 EST

IN NEARLY 15 years of writing political endorsements, I’ve found two questions that do more than all the others combined to gauge how candidates measure up against our editorial board’s philosophy of pragmatic conservatism, with its heavy emphasis on actually solving problems rather than maintaining ideological purity. When he discussed his campaign with our board last week, Mitt Romney nailed one of them and did, well, not terribly on the other one.

I didn’t have to ask Mr. Romney my first question, about working across the political aisle, because he answered it in response to my question about changing the political culture — which he called “essential.”

After reeling off problems our nation faces, from a debt nearing Greek proportions to a nuclear Iran, he said: “We simply have to have a government that can work as opposed to being deadlocked and gridlocked.”

And then this: “I actually had a huge benefit of being elected governor of a state where my legislature was 85 percent Democratic. I learned from that that I had to work across the aisle.”

That started with lengthy meetings every week with the House speaker and the Senate president, even alternating meeting in their offices and his. “After 20 or 30 meetings together, we started talking about our respective problems within our parties,” he said, and they found ways to help each other out. For instance, he might complain more about legislation they were having a hard time getting passed, so their bases would come around.

Scoppe: If you care who our next president is, vote Saturday

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:41 EST

UPWARDS of half the people who cast ballots in the New Hampshire primary were independents. They mainly supported Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, which serves as a reminder that “independent” doesn’t always mean “political center,” but that’s beside the point. The point is this: Independents — or even Democrats, if they’re acting in good faith — don’t need to feel bad about voting in a Republican primary.

To the contrary, when there’s only one primary being held, they ought to feel bad if they don’t. Particularly here in South Carolina.

Saturday’s Republican presidential primary is our speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace moment.

Sure, we get to vote in November. But, at the risk of committing civic heresy, how you and I vote then isn’t going to matter. Yes, yes, everyone who’s paying attention and cares about our republic needs to vote, simply because it’s our duty to do so. But we all know that the Republican candidate is going to carry our state. And all of our Electoral College votes are going to him, whether he wins by a landslide or just eight votes.

So if our vote in November isn’t going to make any difference, and the Democratic nominee already has been chosen by default, then our only opportunity to participate in the election of the next president is to vote on Saturday.

Scoppe: Why endorse a long shot?

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:09 EST

I HAD BEEN dreading the presidential endorsement for months. Yes, we endorsed Joe Lieberman in the 2004 Democratic primary even though there was no way he was going to win, but at least he was a national figure. But try as I may, I couldn’t warm up to anyone other than Jon Huntsman in this year’s Republican primary, and he kept polling below the margin of error. Could a serious newspaper seriously ask voters to support someone whom so many seemed never even to have heard of?

The Boston Globe did, and after I read its endorsement , I sent the editorial to my colleagues on the editorial board, along with this note: “My thinking for some time has been that I would not argue for a Huntsman endorsement unless he did extremely well in New Hampshire or I simply didn’t think it was possible to be intellectually honest in writing an endorsement of another candidate. I still tend to feel that way (and do not yet know the answer to either of those questions), but I thought it was noteworthy that The Boston Globe found a way to endorse him that also recognized the fact that he probably won’t win, and made it clear who its second choice would be.”

Publisher Henry Haitz was the first to respond, saying simply: “I liked their approach.”

Executive editor Mark Lett weighed in with two points that always have guided our approach to endorsements, and that would frame our discussions over the next week:

“1. I think it’s our responsibility to endorse a candidate whose stated values and positions are in line with what we advocate.

Scoppe: The most important candidate in the 2012 field

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:12 EST

Huntsman video at bottom of column

ON THE SURFACE, Jon Huntsman’s prescription for righting the nation’s fiscal woes is standard Republican fare: cut spending, rein in entitlements, reform the tax code and pass a balanced-budget amendment. But dig in a little deeper — ask whether he insists on the balanced-budget amendment that the House passed this summer, the one that goes far beyond what he and nearly all of the nation’s other governors have lived with, undermining majority-rule by turning tax policy over to a minority in either house of the Congress — and you hear one of the essential differences between the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China and the rest of the GOP presidential field.

“Listen, this is going to come down to a negotiation,” Mr. Huntsman said during a visit with our editorial board on Monday. “During the debt-ceiling debate, we got people in their respective corners kind of firing at each other, not willing to make a deal and move on. At some point you’ve got to get the work of the nation done. And I bring that perspective from having been a governor.

“People elect you to get things done. You just can’t stay in your respective corner, fire rhetorically at the other side and expect the business of the nation to move forward and the marketplace to respond positively. It’s not going to happen.”

As with most of the things that distinguish Mr. Huntsman from the other Republican presidential candidates, I can easily remember a time when this perspective would have been unremarkable. What serious candidate for president, or for governor, or for the Congress, didn’t understand that negotiation is essential to a functioning republic? Or to running a business, or surviving a marriage or raising a family or living anywhere other than alone on a deserted island, for that matter?

Scoppe: Extra-legal activities

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:45 EST

THE HALLWAYS outside The State’s newsroom are lined with framed front pages from some of the most important events in our state’s history. My favorite, since long before I understood our byzantine governmental structure well enough to comprehend its significance, was always the 1935 page with a headline that screamed in two-inch-tall letters: “GOVERNOR’S GUNS RULE HIGHWAYS.”

The article recounts one of the most extraordinary, and bizarre, episodes in South Carolina’s political history: First-year Gov. Olin T. Johnston, having been rebuffed by the Highway Commission in appointing new commissioners after the Legislature adjourned for the year, declared the agency in a state of “rebellion, insurrection, resistance, and insurgency” and called up the National Guard to take control of all roads. The guard planted machine guns at the entrances to the department’s headquarters to prevent the holdover commissioners from entering, and the governor sent in his own people to run the agency.

The guard stood guard for nearly two months over our banana republic, until the Supreme Court declared the governor’s recess appointments invalid and his state of emergency unlawful.

This extra-legal exercise of gubernatorial authority ended precisely as any student of S.C. politics might predict: with the Legislature stripping the governor of the power to appoint highway commissioners. (The fact that governors once had such power might be the most surprising part of this story.) And our state suffers from Gov. Johnston’s legacy to this day. The highway commission, renamed the Transportation Commission two decades ago in the Legislature’s first of (so far) two faux reforms, still is composed of members who are selected not by the governor or even the entire General Assembly, but by the legislators who live in each district. It is a system designed to do what it still does best: Make road-building and -improvement decisions based on political horse-trading rather than the needs of the state.

Gov. Nikki Haley was not nearly as dramatic as Gov. Johnston in her first year in office, but what she lacked in drama she made up for in audacity.

Scoppe: Prefiled bills offer a few (but only a few) smart ideas

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:02 EST

PERHAPS IT’S time to abandon my theory that those bills that legislators just can’t wait for the first day of the session to file offer a window into the coming legislative session. Or at least hope it’s wrong.

Even for the second year of a two-year session, this year’s batch of prefiled bills is … uninspiring. And short; I can’t recall so few prefiles, and wonder what lack of legislative energy it portends.

There is of course the usual smattering of bills dealing with tax loopholes — not to close them but to create even more. On a more encouraging note, there are new efforts to put the governor instead of an autonomous, arrogant and judgment-impaired part-time board in charge of the Transportation Department; the bills are notable not because this is a new idea but because the chief sponsor of the Senate bill (S.1022) is Republican Leader Harvey Peeler, and the House bill (H.4444) is sponsored by Speaker Pro Tem Jay Lucas and Judiciary Chairman Jim Harrison.

The good news is that although there are lots of bad ideas among the prefiled bills, there aren’t a lot of bad new ideas. And the two that top my bad-bills list will compete with good bills that take the opposite approach to the same issue:

• S.1027 by Sen. Dick Elliott proposes a public referendum on eliminating the Teacher and Employee Retention Incentive, a retirement give-away that legislators might finally be ready to dismantle. (Lawmakers have made it much less generous, but the idea of allowing individual employees, rather than their supervisors, to essentially determine whether they get paid extra remains offensive.) Public referendums are almost always a bad idea, but this is worse than most. Although I suspect that voters would reject TERI, asking them to make decisions about the intricacies of something so complex as the State Retirement System is a frontal assault on the very notion of representative democracy.

Scoppe: Deja vu all over again

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:50 EST

IF THE HEADLINE on today’s editorial provokes in you a sense of deja vu, that’s because it’s the same one we used last year to greet the annual return of the General Assembly. And it’s no different in substance from the year before that. In fact, the need to overhaul our tax code and spending policies and restructure our government have been among the top five issues confronting the Legislature for as far back as I can recall.

I’m not particularly fond of writing the same editorials year after year, but what choice is there? Our overarching problems are unchanged because the Legislature keeps tinkering around the edges or, worse, fixating on red-meat issues that satiate cable-news-engorged constituents but do nothing to nurture a state starved for a government that actually works. A government that provides the services that our state needs, in at least a moderately efficient way, and that pays for those services through a tax system that does not unnecessarily burden our citizens or undermine our values or give special favors to favored constituencies.

Crisis creates opportunity, and the recession and anemic recovery, piled atop a century and a half of poverty and dysfunctional government, have given our Legislature and our governors ample opportunity to make those fundamental changes that are essential for our government to play the role that only a government can in making South Carolina the place we all want it to be.

At times they have come tantalizingly close, as with the oh-so-near passage last year of a landmark restructuring package that could have given our governors the power to govern and our Legislature the tools and mandate to act like a legislature instead of a 170-headed chief executive. At other times, their refusal even to engage has been maddening, as when they ignored a smart outline — created at the direction of the Legislature — to overhaul our antiquated, loophole-ridden tax code, and instead continued their three-decade fixation on a never-ending series of discrete new tax giveaways that make the system even more porous and inequitable.

Of course, tax, budgetary and governmental reform are not the only things the Legislature needs to deal with in this new session. The state pension systems cry out for reform. And after years of warfare over a relentless campaign by out-of-state ideologues to dismantle public education, the Legislature must get around to actually reforming our public schools so they offer every student in this state a good education.

Scoppe: Haley has chance to reclaim voice on transparency

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:38 EST

IT’S BEEN A ROUGH few weeks for our transparency governor, from the discovery that her office was routinely deleting the sort of emails that most state employees understand they are legally required to keep — including a particularly embarrassing string of messages that one of her Cabinet agencies did keep, and turned over to The Post and Courier under a Freedom of Information Act request — to that cringe-inducing video of Gov. Nikki Haley staring silently at a pair of elevator doors while a reporter asked her about the contents of those messages.

The fact that other governors likewise hit delete more than they should have — Spartanburg’s Herald-Journal reported last month that Mark Sanford’s senior staffers dumped up to 20 gigabytes of official emails in the waning days of the administration — provided only the most transparent of fig leaves for the chief executive who was swept into office on a pledge of more open government.

But just before Christmas, Ms. Haley found her footing, announcing that her staff would work with the Department of Archives and History to update her records-retention policy, in what she termed “another major step toward transparency.”

Never mind the motive; the disturbing fact is that no governor in 40 years had taken the Archives Department up on its offer to help update a woefully inadequate records-retention policy, and so all of Ms. Haley’s predecessors had operated under ambiguous rules that left far too much to the whims of governors and their staffs. Ms. Haley promises a new policy this month, and though we can’t judge it until we see it, indications are that it will indeed be a significant step toward openness. And for that she is to be commended.

The governor didn’t actually acknowledge how hypocritical it was for her to maintain the old delete policy without question; as the architect of her transparency campaign, the S.C. Policy Council’s Ashley Landess, put it, “When you run on a platform of fully open, transparent government, you better be the most open elected official at the table every time without exception.” But it’s still a relief that the governor would respond to widespread criticism by taking action to correct such a gross abuse, rather than trying to blame “that little girl” at The Post and Courier for asking her mean questions. We can only hope it will neutralize the growing resentment in the Legislature that her rules apply to everyone except her.

Scoppe: Looking for President Right

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:06 EST

I WAITED lackadaisically through the fall for that bolt of lightening that would make it clear which Republican candidate was best suited for the presidency. But the days between now and Jan. 21 began to dwindle, and still nothing more than a general feeling.

So when the wonkish Project Vote Smart unveiled its “VoteEasy” program, a quiz that uses the voters’ positions to reveal their perfect candidate matches, I rushed over to the site to take a look.

I started with foreign policy, the one clearly legitimate topic for presidential debate. Alas, the scant two questions on the subject offered virtually no distinctions, either among Republicans or between the Republicans and President Obama: With the exception of uber-libertarian Ron Paul, everybody supports “targeting suspected terrorists outside of official theaters of conflict,” and all but Mr. Paul and Jon Huntsman support U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan. I didn’t need a test to tell me I don’t like Mr. Paul, and Mr. Huntsman’s position on Afghanistan — which he explains quite respectably, if unconvincingly — doesn’t diminish my admiration for him.

All the candidates except Mr. Paul agree with me that we should offer business tax incentives and spend money on infrastructure in order to promote economic growth, but only Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Obama support “federal spending as a means of promoting economic growth” — which made me wonder what the other candidates think business tax incentives and infrastructure spending are.

I tend to like an “all of the above” approach to the budget, but when I said yes to balancing it in general and to all the specific options — reducing spending on defense, Medicare and Medicaid and raising taxes — Mr. Paul came out on top, even though I know enough to know that we don’t agree about much of anything. He was tied with Buddy Roemer, who isn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, although everybody else was so close behind as to make this series of questions meaningless as well.

Scoppe: Haley puts her money where her mouth is

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:26 EST

TALK IS cheap, and for a year and a half, we’ve been hearing what had the ring of cheap talk from Nikki Haley about how businesses and individuals and churches and other charities would miraculously address the needs of poor communities that she doesn’t want the government spending money to address.

It’s the sort of talk we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from politicians and regular citizens who have never met a poor person and can’t possibly comprehend the pathology of poverty, or the depth of the need, and who want a respectable cover for their unwillingness to help out. It was particularly off-putting that her vision for improving the state she sought to lead was based on other people voluntarily giving more, when she herself had given so little toward charitable causes.

Even Haley supporters rolled their eyes, and continued to support her in spite of this pie-in-the-sky nonplan, rather than because of it. Business leaders laughed in frustration at the thought of giving more while they were laying off valuable employees. Church leaders across the political and religious spectrum threw up their hands in exasperation, wondering how they were supposed to take on the job that had long fallen to the government, when they were having to scale back their own outreach programs, and even some internal programs, because giving was down as parishioners suffered through the jobless recovery.

But last week, Gov. Haley put her money where her mouth was, announcing that she was putting up $200,000 in leftover inaugural funds and the $550,000 advance on her upcoming book and promising any additional profits from the book to create a nonprofit foundation to carry out her vision.

I’ve never been impressed by politicians who make donations of other people’s money. The inaugural overage, like campaign funds, is money that by law politicians can’t divert to their own personal use anyway.

Scoppe: Legislature to blame for primary funding problem

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:29 EST

WITH MONEY short and Republicans trying to defend their fiscal-conservative credentials against Gov. Nikki Haley’s anti-spending demands, the 2011 General Assembly made a breathtakingly irresponsible gamble with next month’s GOP presidential preference primary: It trusted the word of political party officials that they would pay a third of the $1.5 million cost of conducting the election.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that state law requires the state to conduct the primary and the Legislature isn’t in session to change the law, the Republican Party has pulled a bait-and-switch, announcing that it won’t pay what it promised. It won’t even pay everything it collected under what was for all practical purposes a state fee — a fee that was set not by the Legislature but by the party itself.

An extraordinary provision in state law allowed the party to set the fee for candidates to have their name appear on the state ballot — the GOP charged $25,000 for early filers and $35,000 for procrastinators — but required it to turn over only $20,000 per candidate to the state.

The S.C. filing fee is the most expensive among the early primary states, and everyone assumed those extra-high fees ultimately would be remitted to the state. But that’s because everyone assumed the party would keep its word.

It’s bad enough to turn over the state’s taxing authority to a private entity; this arrangement is akin to allowing stores to charge whatever sales tax they want but remit only the standard 6 percent to the state. So while the Republican Party sticks the taxpayers with a $500,000 bill to pay for a primary that isn’t even binding, the party will turn a profit.

Scoppe: With friends like Haley, reform movement can’t afford any enemies

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:21 EST

FOR SOMEONE who claims to want to drag our horse-and-buggy government into the 21st century, Gov. Nikki Haley sure does seem to be going out of her way to keep it mired in the 19th century.

Her first blow against government restructuring came this summer, when she threw a fit because Senate efforts to do some significant restructuring rather than passing her restructuring-lite plan meant she might not be able to check that item off of her first-year to-do list. After lawmakers recessed without passing her bill, she used a politically foolish tactic to try to force lawmakers back into session to pass it. A majority of the Supreme Court said her action violated the state constitution, and judging from an extraordinary poll this month that found the governor’s approval ratings as low as the Legislature’s, she also apparently misjudged her ability to make lawmakers her whipping boys.

She spent a lot of time since then telling tall tales, overselling her job-recruitment success and undercutting S.C. workers, but as with the June meltdown, the damage was more to herself as messenger than to the message of empowering S.C. governors to control the executive branch of government.

But now in quick succession she has injured the reform effort on two fronts, simultaneously undermining its philosophical underpinning and sabotaging the only strategic approach in two decades that has held any promise of succeeding.

The philosophical underpinning of the restructuring movement is accountability: We need to turn control of agencies over to the governor so voters can hold someone they elected responsible when things go wrong, or right. But Ms. Haley is absurdly insisting that she was not behind the ouster of John Frampton as director of the Department of Natural Resources. If we buy that line, it means that we can’t hold her responsible for the action — or anyone else, since it was carried out by an appointed board.