Echo Chamber – Leatherman “Flips The Script” On Harrell’s House

THE “LITTLEST DIGGER” SHOWS HIS POLITICAL ACUMEN

FITSNews – April 6, 2008 – Don’t worry, we’re not falling for State Sen. Hugh Leatherman’s latest political ploy.

Sure, South Carolina’s “Godfather of Pork” pulled a master stroke last week when he defied all precedent and submitted a state spending plan that was $50 million less than the House budget, but we’re not about to show this miniscule Marxist any love.

After all, you don’t congratulate a fiscal crackhead for tossing you a nickel after he’s drained your life savings and pushed your peeps even further into the poor house over the previous three years.

Having said that, the tiny Commie bastard known around Columbia as the “Littlest Digger” may have accomplished one of the most ingenius political misdirections in state history last week …

The head fake starts like this … with us writing a sentence we never thought we’d write; namely that the biggest pork barrel spender in the state actually cut something from a proposed spending plan.

Seriously, people. We were on the floor. It took smelling salts to revive us.

But therein lies Leatherman’s tactical genius. By doing something that ran counter to every big government bone in his diminuitive body, the Leninist Lilliputian handed his taller (but equally reckless) big government allies in the S.C. House of Representatives a stunning political defeat.

From the Associated Press:

Revenue collections in South Carolina through February are already more than $50 million behind projections and forecasts look gloomy, so it seemed prudent to take $50 million from the House plan and eliminate $30 million in pork projects approved by the House, Leatherman said.

“I guess you might call this a pork-free budget,” the Florence Republican said. “We were not willing to put any projects of any nature in our budget. As I said, to the best of our ability, we’ve taken all those out and I suspect they’ll stay out all through the process.”

And for once, Leatherman’s lips were moving at the same time that something remotely truthful was coming out of his mouth. He even addressed several concerns of the conservative S.C. Policy Council when he removed several pork barrel items from the House version of the state budget.

Of course, the $7 billion spending plan Leatherman’s panel passed last week is still a taxpayer headache for any number of reasons. Among the most glaring inefficiences it perpetuates are:

* Duplicating services via a wasteful, unaccountable 1895 government structure.
* Funding a disproportionately high number of state-supported colleges and universities.
* Pouring more money into a fundamentally-flawed K-12 system.
* Enacting across-the-board cuts that do nothing to prioritize core government functions.

On top of that, having jacked state spending by over 40% the past three years, trimming a little off the top in a year where prior overspending has forced state revenues into another tailspin isn’t a noble deed, it’s an inescapable economic reality.

The same thing happened a decade ago, which is the last time Republicans were forced to confront the economic downturn that accompanied the end of a multi-year spending orgy.

Yet as fiscally insignificant as Leatherman’s $50 million sliver of “savings” may be, each of those dollars is worth its weight in gold when it comes to the House-Senate PR war.

Specifically, it forces House Speaker Bobby Harrell to defend why his members put that $50 million worth of pork in the budget to begin with, a criticism Harrell and his allies were no doubt expecting to level at Leatherman.

None of this budgetary brinksmanship means anything substantive, of course, because at the end of the day we’re all still getting screwed by a government that does too much, spends too much, gives back too little and fails to recognize that the 21st Century is now upon us.

So while Leatherman gets points for a well-played hand in the bicameral poker game that takes place each year in Columbia (with your tax dollars), the truth is all this jockeying for position doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Without real restructuring and a revenue cap that forces all of these jokers to stop overspending and start investing in our economy for a change, we’ll continue our call for a plague on both their houses.

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