Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Big Improvement: Scoppe Column is only half-blind

Pop Quiz: Is $100 too much or a good deal?

Now any reasonably intelligent adult understands why this question doesn't make any sense. It depends on what you're buying: $100 for a year of car insurance is a fantastic price, but it's way too much for a pack of gum.

Cindi Scoppe's latest column is part 8,487,596 of the The State's continuing series on "Why Your Taxes Are Not Too High So Shut Up Already." She looks at Palmetto State taxes and provides a bunch of absolute numbers to back her claim that "no matter how you crunch the numbers, SC isn't a high tax state." Really? And so Scoppe selects out a bunch of numbers that make it look like we Sandlappers are undertaxed by a graceful and lenient government that really could (ought to?) demand much more from us.

Of course one of the things that Scoppe never does is to look at the quality of the services we get for that money. Is $100 too much or too little? That's the format that Scoppe takes for her column.

Why not take a look at what South Carolinians are getting for their money? Like the 50th ranked schools in the country, with the highest drop-out rate, lowest SAT scores, and achievement scores going 2-to-1 in the wrong direction?

All of a sudden, we don't seem undertaxed at all...

Posted by Bill Smith at 1:00 PM | 2 comments

Comments:

You are SO right! And although the state public education system is our loss-leader when it comes to not getting our moneys' worth out of our tax dollars, education is by NO means the only place we are getting rooked. Look at the dismal roads and highways in this state. Heck, consider government itself: We have literally dozens of major problems in South Carolina that our state and local governments ought to be addressing, and yet the nearest thing we get to solutions are things like giving homes to crack addicts and vagrants, or tacking an additional $20 registration fee onto the already ridiculous sum it takes to get a car on the road here, in order to support a turkey bus system. Sheesh.

# posted by Anonymous : 9/20/2006 10:49:00 PM

I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked through and read the article.

Dang.

I loved this last paragraph:

"much less to justify having the state Legislature impose even further limits on the ability of local communities to decide how much government they are willing to pay for."

Oh, those poor oppressed "local communities", always at the mercy of the state legislature trying to take their candy away.

Cindi? Cindi? It's not the "local communities" who are the problem. It's the local governmental units in those communities that can't responsibly manage the money entrusted to them that always want more, more, more.

# posted by Anonymous : 9/22/2006 07:29:00 AM

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