Burying the Lede

The State is always among the first voices to say that South Carolina's government does not have enough revenue. You'd think that this would mean that they would be willing to aggressively go after waste in government, instead of just advocate raising taxes on citizens. So why are there no editorials decrying our corrupt, inefficient system for the providing school buses?

No, in The State, that story gets buried:

South Carolina is the only state in the country that owns and runs its own school buses, and education officials said the bus fleet has shrunk because fuel and labor costs are up while funding from the Legislature is down.

South Carolina needs to buy about 350 to 400 new buses each year, each costing about $60,000, to keep up with a typical 12-year replacement cycle, Tudor said. But the state has only bought a total of 300 new buses since 2002.

The lack of decentralized, competitive system for providing school buses costs us something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a billion dollars every ten years.

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