Taxing Questions

Competitiveness. Sustainability. Equity.

Bringing these three key attributes to an antiquated, out-of-whack tax code seems to be at the forefront of everybody’s agenda at the S.C. State House these days, but beneath the “heard-it-all-before” rhetoric, convoluted formulas and delaying tactics, is anybody in the General Assembly going to step forward and actually propose a tax cut?

We keep waiting, but nothing so far.

Of course, we have powerful Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman proposing that we study the issue further through his Tax Rehabilitation Commission, or TRAC, which is frankly the last thing we should be doing right now.

We don’t need yet another G.D. knee-jerk, legislatively-controlled state board/ commission – i.e. eleven wealthy, establishment jokers whose expenses and per diem we would have to pick up just so they could come to Columbia and basically whack each other off rhetorically.

Seriously, people. This non-august assemblage would probably even feature Burnie Maybank among its members – the ultimate status quo calling card and a sure sign that this is going to be nothing more than yet another taxpayer-funded circle jerk.

After all, if idiots like Maybank have been guiding the policy all these years (as they have), how exactly is listening to them going to fix anything?

It’s not.

Perhaps that’s why other lawmakers want to study the issue through executive action.

Just yesterday, Rep. Bakari Sellers (D- Barnwell) fired off a letter to Gov. Mark Sanford asking him to sign an executive order creating a study commission that would “conduct a comprehensive examination of our state’s current tax structure.”

“Our failure to grapple with this issue denotes gross irresponsibility,” Sellers’ letter to Sanford reads.

“I want to hear from people who know what they’re talking about,” the second-term lawmaker told FITS in his office yesterday, “not non-expert lawmakers.”

Fine. That’s all well and good.

Except, of course, at the top of Sellers list to include on the executive study committee is Darla Moore, who like Maybank has been dispensing atrocious tax advice to S.C. lawmakers and policymakers for years now.

Look, we’re all for studying stuff, people, except that’s precisely what we’ve been doing in this state for decades.

And these are the same idiots who’ve been studying it this whole time …

And what the hell is there left to study, when you get right down to it?

We’ve prodded, pinched and probed our tax code so many times it might as well be one of those alien corpses they keep in Area 51.

If we’re going to study anything, we should study this … how come South Carolina’s Board of Economic Advisors (which is responsible for providing fiscal impact statements on all proposed tax changes) refuses to take into account the stimulative effect of tax cuts on economic growth?

Seriously, people.

We’re among the only states in the nation that refuses to do this, as John Rainey (another tax policy dinosaur) and his team of socialist monkeys at the BEA will only tell us only how much tax cuts are going to cost the state, not how much they will bring in.

Until we fix that fundamental problem, we’ve only considering half of the equation, and our lawmakers are basically flying blind when they’re discussing tax policy.

Which would obviously explain a lot …

Gov. Mark Sanford has proposed some tax relief in his latest budget, but given the economic emergency we’re facing as a state, we don’t think his plan goes far enough.

There’s a time for study and there’s a time for action, people.

And it’s frankly past time that somebody up at the State House figured out the difference …