Wednesday, May. 27, 2009

Scoppe: Blame-shifting silliness with jobless agency — again

THE MOST recent salvo in the war over the Employment Security Commission is at best silly and at worst an attempt at blame-shifting.

A couple of weeks before lawmakers were scheduled to adjourn for the year, Gov. Mark Sanford wrote Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell and House Speaker Bobby Harrell to ask them 1) to try one last time to push through legislation to turn control of the agency over to him and 2) whether they wanted him to continue borrowing money to pay the swelling number of unemployment claims that the state doesn’t have money to cover.

Or at least that’s what the letter purported to be about.

It was absolutely appropriate — if unrealistic, given that the legislation had not passed either body yet — for the governor to ask legislative leaders to take one more run at the proposal.

But except for a couple of sentences, nothing else in the two-page letter resembles the request one would make to someone whose help he actually hopes to enlist. It is filled with accusations and innuendo, with suggestions that Mr. McConnell and Mr. Harrell would be to blame if business taxes go up to pay for the claims we can’t pay because we don’t collect enough taxes to pay them. In fact, it reads more like another of the governor’s news releases attacking the Legislature than a sincere effort to accomplish anything.

And the second question is so silly that it’s hard to argue with Mr. McConnell when he charges that the governor was trying to pick another fight — “making up confrontations” to have with the Legislature, as he put it. Of course the governor needs to keep authorizing the borrowing, as a growing number of other states are having to do, because we have a legal obligation to pay the claims, and even if we didn’t have that obligation, it would be self-defeating not to.

But more disturbing than the combative tone of the letter is the governor’s continued assertion that somehow our problems would be solved if only the Legislature would put him in charge of the agency.

There is no question that the commission needs reform. It is structurally deficient — an agency run by an executive director who answers to a full-time board with no job qualifications and filled by three ex-legislators. And while I sympathize with those in the Legislature who are angry at the governor, it is the height of irresponsibility to allow emotion to dictate policy, as many lawmakers have done in refusing to pass legislation to reform the last bastion of unadulterated legislative cronyism and make changes to our unemployment compensation law. Nothing in the legislation that everybody seemed to have agreed they needed to pass suddenly became bad after it became less clear that the Legislature would be able to bypass Mr. Sanford’s objection to using federal stimulus funds to stimulate the state’s economy

Having said that, though, the agency’s governance and the shortfall in the unemployment compensation trust fund are apples and oranges.

It’s one thing to argue that it was the commission’s fault that we had to start borrowing money last year (as opposed to, say, this year) to pay unemployment claims. It’s a stretch, but it’s defensible, because the commission should have been more aggressive in alerting the Legislature and even the public that the trust fund was leaking money like a sieve, as jobless claims exceeded taxes paid in to the fund year after year. But to suggest that eliminating the commission would get us out of this mess, or prevent it from getting worse, is pure fantasy.

As Mr. McConnell explained in a letter back to the governor, “The reason the cost of unemployment benefits has skyrocketed in recent years is because so many South Carolinians have lost their jobs in the recession.”

Well, that and the number who were losing their jobs before the recession hit.

I am not among those who lay the blame for our high jobless rate (We’re No. 3!) at the governor’s feet. No one person is entirely to blame — and in this state, it’s hard to keep a straight face while claiming that a governor is responsible for much of anything. But he bares more responsibility than the bureaucrats over at the Employment Security Commission, whose portfolio does not include job creation or recruitment but only paying out unemployment insurance.

Perhaps before his next missive, Mr. Sanford might want to review that lesson about casting stones.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

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