SC Tobacco Ranking: A Decade Of Failure

It’s always pretty easy to find South Carolina in any national report … just start from the bottom.

Unless of course it’s a report about screwing something up with tragic consequences, in which case you should probably start at the top.

It’s sad, but true … and it’s something that’s not going to change until there’s new leadership in South Carolina’s two legislative bodies.

Anyway, here’s some more bad news that paints a decade-long picture of greed and bureaucratic failure …

According to a report released today by the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and the American Heart Association, South Carolina ranks 51st out of the 50 states (and the District of Columbia) in its smoking prevention efforts.

The report, called “A Decade of Broken Promises,” looks at smoking prevention in America over the ten-year-period since the government forced tobacco companies to hand over $246 billion to states as part of a settlement for complicity tobacco-related heath care costs.

More on that momentarily, but here’s how the report ties into the current situation in Columbia.

It’s no secret that House Speaker Bobby Harrell has made raising the cigarette tax his number one goal for the upcoming legislative session … well, that and socializing our economic development efforts.

On the cigarette tax front, Harrell has been cutting deals left and right during the off-season trying to get more lawmakers on board so that an inevitable veto from Gov. Mark Sanford can be overridden.

Of course, Sanford has been flaky at times on the cigarette tax issue, too, and there’s really no telling where he could end up assuming he’s still getting his policy advice from Ed Sellers over at Blue Cross Blue Shield.

At seven cents a pack, South Carolina’s cigarette tax is the lowest in the country.

We’ve said dozens of times in the past we don’t have a problem raising it, but if we do so without passing a corresponding tax cut and significant structural and eligibility reforms, we would be creating a much bigger problem down the road.

In fact, the current “health care crisis” we’re facing today is due in large part to the failure of state government to wisely allocate its tobacco settlement funds – and to fix a broken system.

The basic problem with health care – much like the basic problem with our worst-in-the-nation education system – is that we’re pouring money into a system that simply doesn’t work. And the more money you pour into a broken system, “the more broke it gets.”

At least that’s the way everything seems to work here in South Carolina.

Here’s a particularly telling excerpt from the report:

Under a 2000 agreement between the Legislature and then-Governor Jim Hodges (D), South Carolina securitized its future tobacco settlement proceeds by selling them to investors in exchange for a smaller lump sum payment. The $912 million raised was transferred into four trust funds. The Legislature is responsible for appropriating the money available from the trust funds annually for programs. No tobacco settlement funds have been dedicated to tobacco prevention since 2003.

So rather than taking $2.3 billion over a period of 25 years, South Carolina chose instead to take $912 million up front, which it blew through in about three years, spending virtually nothing on the preventative efforts that were supposed to be the heart of the settlement – and, coincidentally, the heart of the long-term solution.

In other words, rather than actually trying to get people to quit smoking in a sustained, sensible manner over an extended period of time (which would have saved thousands of lives and untold billions in health care costs over the long run), South Carolina chose to raid the money for totally unrelated items – spending 10% of the settlement funds on  local “economic development” programs, for example, and another 2% of the settlement funds on water and sewer projects.

Now, the state spends just $2 million annually on tobacco prevention – the lowest percentage of any state in the nation.

And these are the same people we want to entrust with new cigarette tax revenues?

No way … based on their track record, giving these idiots another red cent would be the definition of insanity.

Raising the cigarette tax in South Carolina is something we should do, but not until we do the following:

1) offset the increase with a job-creating tax cut

2) streamline our health care delivery system (we presently have no fewer than eight health care agencies)

3) clean up the rampant fraud and inefficiency in our Medicaid eligibility system, and last but not least

4) put strict limitations on precisely where and how new money can be spent … with even stricter oversight and accountability.

Unless we insist on these things, South Carolina will be doing what it always does … skimming off the top for legislative pork and putting what’s left into broken, bureaucratic-laden systems that perpetuate government growth by virtue of their own failure to accomplish their desired outcomes.

We simply can’t afford more of that approach in any arena of state government, which is why any plan to raise the cigarette tax that doesn’t include all of the provisions outlined above should be rejected.

Big tobacco obviously lied about the risks of smoking – and they paid a heavy price for their duplicity.

However, their treachery pales in comparison to the failure of state governments across the country – and particularly here in South Carolina – to do what they were supposed to do in exchange for these billions.

Thousands of lives – and billions of dollars – could have been saved, but lawmakers were too greedy, and now they want the “usual suspects” to pick up the tab for their own negligence.

That’s why further penalizing these companies – and individual South Carolina smokers – without first addressing the roots of government’s failure would be a collosal mistake.

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