SC Budget Sent To Nikki Haley

S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley received a (roughly) $22.8 billion budget this week from the S.C. General Assembly … but only by a whisker.

The budget plan for the coming fiscal year – approved earlier in the week by a conference committee of S.C. House members and State Senators – breezed through the Senate by a 39-5 margin. However the wheels came off in the S.C. House, as more than a dozen Republicans were not present in the chamber at the time of the vote. Meanwhile Democrats voted almost uniformly against the spending plan – furious over the fact it (gasp) contained a modest array of parental choice programs for disabled children.

As a result of GOP absences and Democratic obstinance, the budget nearly failed …

In fact had S.C. Speaker Bobby Harrell (RINO-Charleston) not convinced a pair of Democrats to vote in favor of the spending plan, it would have been defeated. With Harrell’s nudging, the vote in the House was 54-52 in favor of the budget.

(Note: Mainstream media are referring to the spending plan as a $6.7 billion budget, however their calculation does not include roughly $7.6 billion in federal funds appropriated to state government and $8.5 billion in “other funds,” paid for by South Carolina taxpayers in the form of fees and fines).

While we believe this spending plan is every bit as misguided as previous budgets passed by fiscally liberal S.C. legislative majorities (namely in that it continues to pump money into failing institutions and a dysfunctional government structure), there are a few good things worth pointing out.

For starters, it is approximately $300-400 million smaller than the spending plan which passed a year ago due a decline in federal funds. Also, the state’s Medicaid rolls were not expanded – at least not beyond the level Haley has already grown them.

That’s a good thing, although we suspect there will be a hard push next year on behalf of this expansion.

On the infrastructure issue, the budget appropriates $91 million in new money to road repairs based on objective criteria, not political considerations. Of course this expenditure pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars the S.C. Department of Transportation has wasted in recent years on totally unnecessary projects – and proposes to continue wasting on unnecessary projects.

The biggest victory in the budget? School choice.

For the first time in its history, South Carolina has taken a tentative first step in the direction of market-based academic reform – approving modest choices for special needs children as well as tax credits for teachers who have to buy their own school supplies.

“This is a first step, but it’s a very important step,” S.C. Sen. Tom Davis (R-Beaufort) said. “Our job now is to expand this proviso and get these measures placed into permanent law, with the ultimate objective being choice for every family in South Carolina.”

(We’ll have more on the choice proposals in a future post, so stay tuned for that …)

Of course in typical South Carolina fashion, this small step forward was accompanied by a costly step backward – specifically $21 million to expand government-run early childhood education per the suggestion of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Obviously we hope this will be the first of many items the governor cuts – in fact fiscal conservatives are expecting Haley to wield a much bigger budget axe this year.

A year ago, Haley issued seventy-four budget vetoes totaling less than $60 million – or one quarter of one percent of the state’s $23 billion budget. The previous year, she cut just $213 million – or less than one percent of that year’s $22.1 billion spending plan.

***

Pic: Travis Bell Photography