Plans are moving forward in both the South Carolina House and Senate to repair many of this state’s deplorable roads with an increase in the gas tax. AsGreenville News writer Tim Smith reported on Friday, the bills that would pump millions of dollars into road repairs apparently don’t have the blessing of Gov. Nikki Haley.
As always, there’s a lot of political maneuvering going on behind the scenes, and probably more so in the Senate where the Senate Finance Committee’s road-funding plan wasn’t set for debate. For example, as Smith reported, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Larry Martin argued the Senate plan had to wait on the House to deal with its plan because of a state constitutional requirement that all revenue-raising bills originate in the House. That is a small setback, if even that, and it should not be seen at this point as an effort to undermine what appears to be a healthy majority view in the Senate to fund drastically needed road improvements with new taxes.
What’s important is that while the plans coming from the House and Senate finance committees aren’t perfect, each is a significant improvement on the long-awaited plan that Gov. Haley unveiled in January that could reasonably be described as an effort to cut an extraordinary amount of state taxes while raising a relatively small amount for state roads. Gov. Haley acknowledged the need to increase the gas tax to improve state roads, but she married her plan with a whopping decrease in the state’s income tax.
An agreement to support an increase in the gas tax essentially was used as leverage by the governor to try to gain a reduction in the state income tax from the top rate of 7 percent to 5 percent over 10 years. If enacted into law, the governor’s plan would blow a hole in the state budget. It also relied on belief that such an income tax cut would stimulate such dramatically higher tax revenues that South Carolina would not suffer in just about every aspect of state government from education to social services, prisons to law enforcement. That would be asking for a whole lot of trust in a state with a proven track record of cutting taxes recklessly and then dealing with the consequences.
To read the full article click the link below:
South Carolina Association of Taxpayers 