Gas tax proposal may be politics, but it will let us keep some of our money

The proposal by Gov. Mark Sanford and the state House to suspend the gasoline tax for three months is definitely election year politics, and it's not an awfully effective method of tax relief, but it's about the last chance this year to let taxpayers keep some of their money.

The General Assembly entered this year with a great deal of new money to spend. State revenues were expected to exceed last year's by almost a billion dollars. And lawmakers have decided to spend it. All of it.

The House voted to return some through expanded property tax relief. But the Senate insisted on spending every dime that economic forecasters may predict the state will gather through taxes.

Lawmakers rejected the call by Sanford to limit the growth of state government and return some of the money to taxpayers through a refund.

The gasoline tax suspension is Sanford's last-ditch attempt to keep some taxpayers' money away from those who would use it to make state government bigger and more expensive.

For that reason, the provision should be enacted.

Its detractors -- those who resist any attempt to let taxpayers keep their own money -- make fun of the measure as election year pandering.

It is an election year, and every move in state government is taken with the election in consideration. Even the carping of those who want no limits on state spending is done with the election in mind.

That doesn't matter. What does matter is that the General Assembly is repeating the mistakes of the past. It is spending as much as it can without regard to the long-term sustainability of these spending programs. These actions will set the state up for trouble during the next economic downturn.

In the economic boom years of the '90s, state lawmakers spent all that the state expected to take in, even accounting for economic growth. When the economy slowed, the state was thrown into fiscal crisis.

Now lawmakers are spending at that old rate, not thinking of the next economic downturn.

A gasoline tax suspension isn't much of a brake

on that kind of spending. But, at this point, it's all we've got.