Reminder: I’m at the conference, “Setting An Agenda for a Better South,” sponsored by the Center for a Better South, based in Charleston.
We’ve just taken about 30 minutes to do a budget-setting exercise, based on the S.C. state budget. The assignment: Decide which programs you might want to give more money, which ones less, find new revenue if you can.
The room is over-represented with Democats, so we all raised taxes – the S.C. cigarette tax is nation’s lowest, 7-cents a pack, so we all raised that. I was tempted to defund the S.C. governor’s office completely. (Gov. Sanford, hello?). But it would be wrong.
Instead I, and plenty of others, reduced some sales tax loopholes, such as removing the $300 cap on sales taxes for cars.
But now we’re talking about how unrealistic the exercise is, since only two of us here are elected officials (and a third is hoping to become one), and noting also that we took 30 minutes, when really you’d want to learn a lot more about which programs really did what.
But the point we’re supposed to notice, I think, is that tax structures are in need of reform (not to raise taxes so much as to make them more fair), and that you really have to think about targeting your new spending in the areas you think are important. Most states have tax structures designed in the pre-World War II era, we were told this morning.
Jay Barth of Hendrix College is pointing out that many states, also, need revisions to state constitutions. SC constitution, e.g., says students need “minimally adequate education” says Adolphus Belk of Winthrop College. Thank goodness for NC’s “sound basic education” clause. Maybe Judge Manning (Leandro case) needs to start riding a circuit through the South?