State House Report March 18 2009

Approving our state’s budget is one of our most important responsibilities as a legislator. You send your hard-earned tax dollars to Columbia and you send your representatives to decide how to best spend that money.

Since Republicans took control of the House in 1994, we have decided to return $15.4 billion back to taxpayers. In the past five years, those cuts included property tax relief, small business tax relief, personal income tax cuts, and the elimination of the grocery tax.

It’s not perfect – no budget ever is – but we were able to keep a promise that we will not raise taxes to balance the state budget. We kept that promise during the early part of this decade when we had several difficult budget years, and we kept the promise again this year.

Part of the “budget week” process is sorting through the hundreds of amendments that members put up in an attempt to influence the final result on behalf of some constituency. We beat back many of these attempts to add earmarks to the budget. Here are a few notable amendments we considered.

• Democrats proposed abolishing the property tax relief that House Republicans approved back in 2006. We soundly defeated the amendment. It would have doubled your property tax bill and re-introduced a tax on groceries. Both increases are just plain wrong in these economic times, and I am proud we defeated them.
• The Obama bailout bill infringes on religious freedom on college campuses. We passed an amendment, along partisan lines, that requires state supported colleges receiving federal bailout funds continue to support and maintain student programs and facilities used for religious activities.

No discussion of the budget is complete without talking about the federal bailout money. We included the federal money in our budget, and there has been much discussion in Republican circles about accepting it. Most people I have talked to believe that this is irresponsible federal spending. I agree, and whole-heartedly supported those in our Congressional Delegation who were in opposition to it.

Once the decision was made by Congress to approve the legislation, the train was on the tracks. The strings attached to the bill made sure that our General Assembly was limited in the amount of money we could control. Of the $8 billion in federal money coming to South Carolina, we control the destiny of less than 5 percent.

The House passed a provision to accept the federal dollars, which I opposed. I assure you the House did not come to that decision lightly. Our children and grandchildren will be paying it back, and South Carolina already pays more to the federal government than we get back. If we are sending our tax dollars to pay this back, we did not want our tax money going to pay for federal pork projects in California and Massachusetts.

The House budget writers told every state agency to not get used to this money because it will be gone in two years. They told the agencies to use the federal money to cushion any expected cuts, but to prepare to make cuts in 2011. We hope this will prevent layoffs of public employees – people who have families and mortgages – while giving agency heads more time to look for ways to further streamline their agencies.

As always, thank you for the privilege of serving you in Columbia. If I can ever be of assistance to you, or if you have ideas on issues you want me to share with the rest of the General Assembly, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 963-0337, or in Columbia at 803 734-3045.