Q&A WITH THE GOVERNOR

Lowering the S.C. income tax rate is his chief priority for the legislative session that opens today, Gov. Mark Sanford told The State.

This will be Sanford’s third legislative session as chief executive, and he says changing the culture of government is, in many ways, more important to him than advancing legislative ideas.

In the interview, Sanford, a Republican, also refuses to rule out a potential run for the White House in 2008, but he dismisses the idea as not being “on my radar screen.”

Here are excerpts:

QUESTION: You’ve outlined five top priorities for the legislative session, including income tax reduction, school choice and changes to Senate rules. Which is your top priority?

ANSWER: The income tax.

QUESTION: Does this one speak more to your basic idea of government?

ANSWER: The education thing does that. In various ways, they all do that. With the income tax, it’s very specifically aimed at, ‘How do you become more competitive?’

Very specifically, it’s tied to the fact that we’re really a state of small businesses. If we want to have impact in our job climate, we’ve got to do something for small business, the real backbone of job creation.

We’ve seen that it’s helped in the job creation front and the business creation front in the states that have given it a try.

QUESTION: How do you answer critics who argue the state’s income tax rate might be higher than other states, but if you consider the number of deductions and credits South Carolina offers, our income tax is no more burdensome?

ANSWER: The biggest impact you can have in the aggregate is lowering rates, is simply lowering marginal rates. (With the current system), you’re still saying the politician should ultimately pick the winner and loser, which is not something I philosophically believe.

QUESTION: Do you worry that the income tax proposal is getting overshadowed by focus on Put Parents in Charge?

ANSWER: That idea (income tax reduction) has been introduced and well debated, and it passed the House, and it would have passed the Senate had we been able to get it up for a vote. It doesn’t worry me a great deal.

QUESTION: There’s been a lot of barroom talk, writings in national publications, that you might be considered a candidate for president in 2008. Will you say yes or no, if you’re re-elected governor, whether you’ll seek higher office?

ANSWER: I’ve totally missed out on this conversation. You don’t hear me talking about it. All this barroom talk, meanwhile, I’m playing with the kids. As I’ve said before, this stuff is flattering, but it (running for president) is the last thing in the world on my mind. It’s not even on my radar screen.

QUESTION: You’ve struggled to get your legislative priorities through a General Assembly that is controlled by fellow Republicans. You’ve clashed openly with legislative leaders. If your goal is to get policy initiatives passed, it seems you’re going about it in a strange way. But you’re also smart enough to know the Legislature is not going to change its ways just because you ask it to. So what is your ultimate goal?

ANSWER: The big, big picture to me is limited government. At the end of the day, I think the people know how to spend their money better than somebody else.

We’re swinging the bat big time on each of these. Put Parents in Charge would be the first statewide (school) choice program in the nation. The income tax proposal would be a shift of money staying in the private sector. To pull those off, you have to have people thinking in that direction.

The biggest thing is trying to impact the debate that ultimately leads to change, and I think we’re getting there. It’s not about swinging the bat. It’s swinging the bat because of the difference it would make in South Carolina and our ability to compete in the rest of the world.

The actual outcomes, you know these different nuggets of legislation, are ultimately in the hands of a legislative body. They pass it or don’t pass it. All you can do is spell them out.

And that’s where some people get very confused. It ain’t Mark’s legislative agenda. At the end of the day, people in the General Assembly, Mark, (we) are going to be just fine. People in these far-off corners of South Carolina who are struggling to make it, they are not going to be just fine. It’s going to be more difficult to compete.

People who say, ‘I don’t want to pass it because it’s Mark’s agenda or someone else’s agenda’ miss the whole point of why we are here. We’re here supposedly to try and make people’s lives just a little bit better through the process of politics here in South Carolina. And politics can make people’s lives a whole lot better or a lot worse.

QUESTION: You seem to have made progress in changing the culture of government, as you call it, by making people ask different questions and look at things differently. But once you’re out of office, that culture could slip right back to where it was before you arrived. Passing legislative initiatives, changing state law, would be around much longer, it would seem.

ANSWER: Whether legislative change lasts longer, I’d respectfully disagree with you. Bobtailing, as a practice, is basically prohibited in the (state) constitution, yet it’s become a tradition and has been around for a long time. If we had said nothing, that, ‘I have to be quiet on that,’ one can very conceivably argue that the practice will not have been curtailed.

In terms of having an impact over time, you’re talking about a very significant change to the taxpayer over time because of the relative inefficient way of doing business that bobtailing incorporates. If you change that tradition, people say we don’t do that, that’s not our practice.

(Some examples of culture change, Sanford says, are less obvious but just as significant, such as his ending the practice of accepting a BMW for his family’s use.)

You get here, and there’s a BMW parked out front, and I said, ‘No, I think the Highway Department or Commerce could use that better than we could.’ I don’t see how the next governor can say, ‘I want the BMW back.’ You guys (in the media) would have great fun.

(Sanford says his decision last year to create an executive budget proposal that is more detailed and specific than those of his predecessors will have long-lasting impact as a change in culture.)

The executive branch has been historically separated from the budgeting process. The front-row seat in any legislative process is what are you spending and where are you spending it this year.

To say, no, not just a boilerplate, 30-page, here’s my wish list, but an operational budget that gets down into the nuts and bolts ... that’s a real world change, that not only has a direct impact this year, but a much bigger impact on future administrations that impacts the way we set budgets in South Carolina.

In 200 years, the executive branch really wasn’t an evolving process. Now it is.

Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658 or asheinin@thestate.com.