Time for politics to meet reality

By BOBBY HARRELL

Guest columnist

This election season you are hearing an outpouring of political rhetoric. One of the biggest political sound bites out there is the governor’s claim that your General Assembly is growing government by astronomical figures. That simply is not true. Fortunately, we are not like the federal government. We are required by our state constitution to have a balanced budget.

The Office of State Budget is a nonpartisan agency that provides all budget numbers for the House, the Senate and the governor. According to its numbers, since 1994 when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, government growth has been held to an annual rate of 4.2 percent. Even with this year’s budget surplus, the Office of State Budget said this year’s increase is a little more than 9 percent.

Many of you remember the slow economy we recently experienced and how the Legislature cut agency budgets deeply. Our entire nation went through the economic downturn. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee all raised taxes to deal with the loss of revenue. South Carolina did not. We cut our budget and lived within our means. Several members of the General Assembly, including me, have been named a Friend of the Taxpayer by the S.C. Taxpayers Association for holding the line on taxes.

Our governor does the legislators, who stood their ground during that difficult time, a terrible injustice when he spreads the rhetoric he is spreading today. Making those hard budget-cutting decisions and refusing to increase taxes is what has led to our economic resurgence.

The governor threatened to call legislators into an extraordinary session to address his vetoes at a cost of almost $100,000 a day to the taxpayers. He said this was necessary so voters could see how their representatives voted before election day. The fact is only 26 out of 124 representatives have a primary opponent, and senators aren’t even up for re-election this year. For more than 20 years, the Legislature has always waited at least two weeks to come back and deal with the governor’s vetoes. That allows time to review them before taking them up.

Every member of the House has voted on everything in the budget not once, not twice but three times. There was a weeklong debate on the House floor in March. The budget came back from the Senate in early May. Then, in late May, the conference committee report on the budget was voted on by the House.

The reality is the governor’s campaign wanted to make a press splash before his primary election, even if it cost taxpayers $100,000 a day to do so.

It is sad to see a member of my own party base his re-election campaign on running against a Legislature that is controlled by his political party. Targeting the General Assembly makes for an easy sound bite. Most voters like their representative, but don’t like the Legislature. Gov. Carroll Campbell would have loved to have Republicans in control of the General Assembly. He did amazing things when all the Republicans had was just over one-third of the House seats.

The problem is Gov. Sanford needs the same people he is attacking to later support his proposals. We have asked the governor many times to work with us; those cries have fallen on deaf ears. Just when you think you are getting somewhere, his office sends out an attack press release, or it announces a fly-around.

This year, we have done almost everything the governor has asked of us.

He asked us to fully repay all of our state’s trust funds. We did.

Gov. Sanford endorsed the House conference committee’s position on property tax relief, and we passed it.

He asked us to use some of our surplus revenue to provide additional tax relief, and we did. We have lowered the sales tax on groceries from 5 percent to 3 percent effective Oct. 1 and eliminated all sales tax for the two days after Thanksgiving.

He asked us to set aside some of the surplus revenue into a contingency fund. We set aside $71 million in a new rainy day fund, which is in addition to the $278 million our other two existing rainy day reserve accounts already contain.

All totaled, more than $1 billion in this year’s budget is being used for tax relief, trust fund repayment and rainy day funds. That is one out of every six dollars in our state budget.

We have a lot of work to do in our state. Our unemployment rate was the third best in the country when Carroll Campbell and David Beasley were governors. Now it is the third worst in the country. Our per capita income was on the rise when Campbell and Beasley were governors; now it is not. We passed the LIFE scholarship and the Education Accountability Act, and now nowhere near enough attention is being given to education.

What we need today is less rhetoric and more leadership.

The governor frequently quotes Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. Dale Carnegie wrote the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Life is about relationships; so is the General Assembly. Leadership is about being able to influence people. The title of Mr. Carnegie’s book tells how to accomplish that.

Mr. Harrell, a Charleston Republican, is speaker of the S.C. House.