South Carolina doesn’t care about teachers, children

Why did you play games with words with your headline, “Teacher exodus could affect your child’s school”? The teacher exodus will affect the schools.

Teachers will continue to leave until the citizens of South Carolina place value on teachers. Sadly, that won’t happen until those same citizens place value on the children.

Since both of these will take a large infusion of money I, unfortunately, don’t see anything good happening any time soon.

How can we stop all this collusion?

Frank Dougherty would like to call collusion a crime because one of the definitions of collusion is conspiracy and conspiracy is a crime.

Well, we have Ford, GM, Toyota and mainstream as well as Fox media outlets colluding with many, many local car dealers to sell automobiles to people right here in Columbia. Do we have enough SWAT teams to bring them all in?

Trade war will hurt South Carolina

According to a recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, South Carolina’s economy stands to suffer “Extremely Significant Damage” if the administration’s planned tariffs on imports are put in place.

The report states that 579,300 S.C. jobs are supported by trade while $3 billion worth of exports are threatened by these retaliatory tariffs.

The Chamber of Commerce is no hysterical left-wing organization and has traditionally supported Republican candidates along with an occasional Democrats. And many economists blame the trade imbalance not on bad trade deals but increased spending fueled by a healthy economy and recent tax cuts.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross compared the tariffs to “going on a diet” that’s not fun in the beginning but eventually worth it.

A responsible diet is one thing; starvation is yet another. Heads up South Carolina.

USC needs a new medical school

As a practicing physician in Columbia for more than 35 years, I am writing in support of a new campus for the USC School of Medicine.

Although the current facilities on the VA Medical Center campus have been a blessing for some 35 years, certain aspects of the aging campus buildings (built in the 1930s) make teaching and research more difficult. In addition, the lease arrangement with the VA will expire in the not too distant future, requiring significant capital investment in order to bring the facility up to current standards.

One can only marvel at the transition from the “Old Columbia Hospital” to the new campus at Palmetto Richland. The Children’s Hospital and other improvements have only expanded and enhanced the care given to South Carolinians and in particular to the residents of the Midlands.

Clustering of industries and educational institutions serves to enhance creativity, collaboration and community. The owner of the Bull Street property in Columbia has donated land to build the USC medical campus in closer proximity to Palmetto Health Richland, and this will ensure greater collaboration than is currently possible. New state-of-the-art teaching facilities and research labs will elevate USC medicine to the next level.

The quality of graduates of the USC medical school is outstanding. They routinely progress to many of the finest residency positions in the United States. Those of us who practice alongside these graduates as they finish their post-medical school training marvel at the preparation they have received.

It is time that we provide these outstanding teachers, researchers, students and future doctors the facility that they deserve.

Why encourage solar only to shut it down?

Four years ago, I watched as the Legislature passed a landmark law incentivizing South Carolinians to explore solar power to reduce our energy costs. Since then the solar industry has boomed here, adding enough solar panels to power 100,000 homes and providing 3,000 sun-power jobs to our economy.

The quick success of sun power in our state demonstrated how hungry we are for alternative-energy options. And it’s no surprise that utilities may have felt that their monopoly status was being challenged when this happened. For-profit business don’t tend to enjoy it when a product (solar energy, in this case) competes with theirs.

But now, with the solar cap, their competition is being shut out, and the result is that consumers are with no affordable options for using alternative energy for our homes and businesses.

What was the point of encouraging the expansion of solar just to pull it back once it became successful? And why are we hampering an entire sector of commerce just because a few private companies tell us it’s the right thing to do?